QUICKLY AGING HERE
Geof Hewitt, tw'enty-six, was bom and raised in Montclair, New
Jersey. Founding editor of The Kumquat Press, he has studied at
Cornell University', Johns Hopkins, and the University of Iowa. Two
short eollections of his poetry have been published; Poem & Ollier
Poems (The Kumquat Press), and 'Waking Up Still Pickled (The
liUabulero Press) . He is now teaching En^sh at the University of
Hawaii.
QUICKLY AGING HERE
Some Poets of the 1970’s
EDITED BY GEOF HEWITT
ANCHOB BOOKS
Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, Nciv York
The Anchor Books edition is the first publication of
QUICKLY AGING HERE: Somc Pocts of the 1970’s.
Anchor Books edition: 1969
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 76-87105
Copyright © 1969 by Doubleday & Company, InC.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
The editor wishes to thank the magazines and publishers who have
given generous permission to reprint the following poems:
Alfred Starr Hamilton’s “Anything Remembered,’’ “April Lights,’’ “Guardian,’’
“Liquid’ll,’’ “Town,” “White Chimes,” from Efoch, © 1963, 1964, 1967
by Cornell University; “Bronze,” “Didn’t You Ever Search for Another
Star?” “Psj-che,” from Sphinx, © 1968 by The Kumquat Press.
Shirley Kaufman’s “I Hear You,” “Mothers, Daughters,” from Poetry Norih-
Spring 1968, © 1968 by Shirley Kaufman; “It Stays,” from
The Southern Retnew, Spring 1969, © 1969 by Shirley Kaufman; “The
"Watts,” from Choice, © 1967 by Choice, a Magazine of Poetry
and Photography; “Room” from Nc<w American Review fi2, © 1967 by
Shirley Kaufman.
Eric Torgersen’s “Aubade,” from hayai 13; “I’m Married,” “The Cage,”
from ^ochy © 1967, 1964 by Cornell University; “jensen: a slideshow,”
from Porfry Norihwest, Summer 1969, © 1969 by Eric Torgersen; “Leg-
ends, from Ltllabulero by permission of Lillabulero Press.
Philip Dow’s ‘®eath,” from The Nation, © 1968 by The Nation Associates
196*7* 1^9 Poet,” “Twilight in California,” from Choice, ©
Joseph Cardarelli’s “The Marlborough Poems,” ‘Waiting for Lunch,” from
KumguaZ, © 1968 by The Kumquat Press; “Refrain” (originally en-
titled: Connection”) from Epoch, © 1968 by Cornell University.
Coleman Barks’s “Body” from Tennessee Poetry Journal, © 1968 by Tennessee
Hiram Poetry Review, May 1968, ©
1968; The Driver,” from Foxfire, March 1968, © 1968 by Eliot Wig-
^nton; “Feather River Valley,” from Latitudes, © 1969; “Finger of
Necessity,” from Kumquat 3, © 1969 by The Kumquat Press; “Nickajack
^ve, from Ann Arbor Review j^l5/€, Spring 1969, © 1969 by Fred
Wolven; “The Oracle,” from Gnosis, Fall 1968, © 1968.
Sophia Castro-Leon’s “A Letter,” “Again Beginning,” “Soft Rain,” “Turning,”
from Kumquat, © 1967, 1968 by The Kumquat Press; “The Eye,”
Taces,” from hayak 11.
Dennis Trudell’s “Gambol,” “The Jump Shooter,” from The Fiddlehead; “Go-
ing to Pittsburgh,” “The Guest,” from The Wormwood Review filSO,
© 1968 by The Wormwood Review.
David Hilton’s “Childhood Ambition,” “Hang On,” from Kumquat 3, © 1969
by The Kumquat Press; “Getting Short,” “Zoo, with Lamp and Chairs,”
from University of Tampa Poetry Review, © 1969 by Duane Locke ; “The
Newlyweds’ Accident,” from Poetry Northwest, Winter 1967-68, © 1968
by David Hilton; “Sunday Again,” from Abraxas 1, © 1968 by Abraxas
Press. ‘Tn Praise of BIG Pens” from Chicago Review.
VI
Mary Ellen SoU’s “Lobelia,” “Marigold,” “Wild Crab,” from Flowers In Con-
crete, Design Program, Fine Arts Dept., Indiana U; “Zinnia,” from
Concrete Poetry, Britain, Canada, and the V.S.A.; “The Visitor,” from
Poor Old Tired Horse.
William Hathaway’s “Card Burning in Central Park,” “Conspiracy in Iowa,”
from New. American & Canadian Poetry ^8; © 1968 by John Gill;
“When Beulah Did the Hula” from Poetry Northwest, Winter 1968-69,
© 1969 by William Hathaway.
Joseph Brown, S.J.’s "upon which to rejoice," from America, © America, Na-
tional Catholic Weekly, Netv York, N.Y. 10019.
Thomas Hanna’s “1 Make Fallout Too,” from Epoch, Fall, 1968, © 1968 by Cor-
nell University; “The Downtown Swan TTiing,” from Latitudes, © 1969;
"Christmas, Ibiza,” from IFest Coast Review, © 1969 ; “The Song of
Casj-or Brioschi,” from The Trojan Horse.
Barbara L. Greenberg’s “Pan American Flight 207 — Delayed,” from The Michi-
gan Quarterly Review FI, 1967, © 1967 by The University of Michigan;
“April Sl’st,” “The Husband,” from Premiere 4, © 1967; “The Gentle-
man’s Garden,” Poetry Northwest, Summer, 1969 © 1969 by Barbara
L. Greenberg; “Poem for a Dead Aunt,” from The Antioch Review;
“Wedlock,” from Shenandoah, © 1969 by Shenandoah'. The Washington
and Lee University Review.
Stan Rice's “On the Murder of Martin Luther King,” from Choice, © 1969 by
Choice.
Floyce Alexander’s “Li Po,” from Foyages; “Nowhere,” from Choice, © 1969
by Choice; “Poem for a Painter,” from Tri-Quarterly 12, © 1969 by
Tri-Quarterly 12, Northwestern University Press; "The Lotus Eaters,"
from kayak IS.
William Witherup’s “For Robert Bl}-,” from Prairie Schooner, © 1969; "Mar-
ian at Tassajara Springs,” “The Great White Father,” from Lillabulero
by permission of Lillabulero Press; "On the Death of Theodore Roethke,”
from Prairie Schooner, Spring, 1966, © William Witherup, "Freeway,”
from Trace, © 1969 by James Boyer May.
Sandford LyaPs “Notes from an Ohio Tavern,” from The Plum Creek Re-
view.
Peter Fcllowes’s “A Change of Heart,” “Predator,” from Epoch, Spring,
1968, © 1968 by Cornell University; “Vietv from an American
Window,” from Kumguat 1, © 1967 by The Kumquat Press.
Colette Inez’s “Cold Waltzes,” from The Nation, © 1963 by The Nation
Associates, Inc.; “For Denise McNair,” from Open Places 4, © 1968
by Open Places; “Force of Snow,” from Shenandoah, © 1968 by
^enandoalf. The Washington and 1/rc University Revietv; “Sauerkraut
Talk Shreds,” from Trace 66, © 1968 by James Boyer May; “Slum-
mght’ ’ from Poetry Bag, © 1968 by Poetry Bag; “The Woman
Uho Loved Worms," from Four Quarters, © 1967' by La Salle
College; "Unaware that Avessek,” from Latitudes, © 1969.
William Brown’s “An Exchange of Letters,” “Minding Our Own Business,”
from Poriry Sorlhwest, © 196S by William Brmvn; “Wondering
How, from The North American Review, © 1967 by Cornell College.
vii
Gerald Butler’s “This Side of Orion,” [Part I, ‘Flash,’ from The Hudson
Review, Vol. XVII, No. 2 (Summer, 1964). © 1964 by The Hudson
Review, Inc.]; [Part 12, from Hollow Orangc\
Dan Gillespie’s "Abandoned Copper Refineiy,” from Chelsea 20/21, © 1967
by de Palchi Corporation Publisher; “Desert Gulls,” "Poem for the
Disappearing Bear,’’ "For a Bum Seen Walking,” from kayah (10 &
14) ; “Strip Mining Pit,” from Choice, © 1969 by Choice; “To
New Jerusalem,” from The Carletois Miscellany, © 1967 by Carleton
College.
Craig Sterry’s “Margaret,” from Pebble 1, © 1968 by Greg Kuzma;
“Montana Visit," from Lillabulero, by permission of Lillabulero Press;
“Dream Poem )j(l” from JPormwood Review, © 1969 by The Worm-
wood Review; “To a Suicide,” from Southersi Poetry Review, Spring,
1969.
Denis Johnson’s “Checking the Traps,” “The Man Among the Seals,” from
The North American Revie^v, © 1969 bj’ The University of Northern
Iowa; “Quickly Aging Here,” from Sou’wester, © 1969 by The
Board of Trustees of Southern Illinois University.
KOTE
Since this anthologj' ws edited, several of the poets have
had book manuscripts accepted for publication. Tlie list which
follows is complete as of September 1969. Dates of publica-
tion are only approximate.
Alfred Starr Hamilton: Selected Poems; Jargon Books (High-
lands, N.C.) : 1970,
Shirley Kaufman; The Floor Keeps Turning (Winner of the
U. S. Award of the International Poetry Forum); Uni-
versity of Pittsburgh Press: January' 1970*
My Little Sister (translations), by Abba Kovner; Pen-
guin Books (New York) : 1970.
Eric Torgeisen; The Carpenter; Tlie Salt Mound Press (Buf-
falo, N.Y.): 1969.
Coleman Barks: an as yet untitled collection of poems;
Harper & Row (New York) : 1970.
David Hilton: The Shot Goes In; Quixote Press (Madison,
Wise.) : 1969.
Mary Ellen Solt: The Peoplemover: 1968; The Finial Press
(Urbana, 111 .) : 1970.
Raymond DiPalma & Stephen Shrader: Macaroons; Doones
Press (Bowling Green, Ohio) ; 1969.
Raymond DiPalma: Max; Body Press (Iowa City, Iowa):
1969.
Between The Shapes; Zeitgeist (Lansing, Mich.); 1969.
Gerald Butler: Little Girl Lost (a novel); Calder & Boyers,
(London) : 1970.
Fanny Howe: Forty Whachs (stories); Houghton Mifflin,
(New York) : 1969.
introduction
But is there really time for wTiting poems? And of what
TOlue is such an outdated genre, especially in view of tlie fact
that more people seem to write than read poetry? Time is
running out, and if you really have something to say, mahe
a film or commit an atrocity: get interviewed hy CBS. Unless
you find waiting poems fun, or hold out secret hopes tliat
things will change. Or is it poetry that needs to change?
Bill Knott, who like many other new' poets is conspicu-
ously absent from Quickly Aging Here (he has a book out,
and anyone who has published a book, or been included in
a major anthology, was not considered for tliis collection)
wrote a poem that tells us:
Only you can resunect the present. People
need your voice to come among them like nakedness,
to fuse them into one marching language in which tlie word
“peace” will be said for the last time.
Write slogans, write bread that pounds the table for silence,
write what I can’t imagine: words to wake me and all those
who slump over like sapped tombstones when the generals
talk.
The world is not diwded into your schools of poetry.
No: there are the destroyers-the Johnsons, Kys, Rusks, Hit-
lers, Francos— then &ere are those
they want to destroy— lovers, teachers, plows, potatoes:
this is the division. You
are not important. Your black mountains, solitary farms
LSD trains. Don’t forget: you are important.
If you fail, there will be no-one left to say so.
If you succeed, there will also be a great silence. Your names,
an open
secret in all hearts, no-one will say. But everywhere
they will be finishing the poems you broke away from.
(from Part I of “To American Poets”i)
iFrom: The Naomi Poems Corpse And Beans, by Bill Knott
XI
QUICKLY AGING HERE
Poetry; the attempt at peace, the momentary place where
fulfillment is possible, the grand reassurance that we ean
indeed still change the outside world, or make it disappear.
Walter Lowenfels has said it:
If you wonder, as I do now and then, whether this is tlie mo-
ment to talk about poems, keep in mind that often in this age of
confrontation anything else seems crazier. We are witnessing a
vast outpouring of poems, each a triumph over the possibility of
complete human disaster. The poem gives us that momentary
dilation of vision in which we seem larger tlian we know; it shows
us not only what living feels like, but what it could be.2
But in spite of the promise that poetry holds, our present
situation indicates that redemption is more elusive. Every-
one makes a big deal out of liking poetry, and once or twice
a year some publishing house brings out a book called “The
(insert a euphemism for “wet behind the ears” followed by
a nationality or two) Poets.” Tire implication that such a
book has the poets of a particular category makes me suspi-
cious, once I quell tlie initial dismay that I am not among the
elite.
1 tried out scores of names for this book, all studiously
avoiding that particular limiting adjective: “Emerging Poets”
was a favorite for a long time, followed in rapid succession
by “Soup of the Day,” “The Balance of Silence,” “A Wilder-
ness of Monkeys,” “Tlirough the Third Ear,” “Generation:
Some Poets of the 1970’s,” and finally what at last seems
(1940-1966); A Big Table Book, Follett Publishing Company, (g)
1968 by William Knott; reprinted by permission of tlie author.
2 From the Preface to 'Where Is Vietnam? ed. Walter Lowenfels;
Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1967— an Anchor Original.
xii
INTRODUCTION
right, the title of a Denis Johnson poem, found on page 325.
Ironically, Johnson is, at twenty, the youngest poet in
Quickly Aging Here.
But new ideas in poetry are not an exclusive province of
the young, although implication often suggests that. As a
matter of fact some of the "new” ideas in poetry are not so
hot to start rvith. Tire "screw it all, I don’t have a method
for writing, I just do my thing” school had a new idea, hut the
inarticulate soon slump, or else inform themselves. I’m not
demanding that every poet express his trade secrets or set
down pretentious dicta. Yet the sullen gangs have grown
tiresome, and something about the way they’ve accepted
commercial acceptability makes me wonder. Well, new poetry
can he written by anyone, regardless of age, and this book
represents the work of writers ranging in age from twenty to
fifty-five.
In spite of such statistical diversity. I’m sure that Quickly
Aging Here reveals certain editorial prejudices. I’ll admit to
difficulty with poems that do not evoke an early, favorable
response: if my initial reaction to a poem is negative, I have
a rough time rereading it. Generally, I need to understand
something of what’s happening in the poem. This can be a
story, an intellectual argument, or even a trick of syntax. But
I have little success reading the grand poems of mystery that
so many poets write, as if obscurity by itself were some great
virtue. The value of obscurity is nothing if the poem does
not offer a toe hold to the intelligence veiled by that obscu-
rity. Without the toe hold a poem either fails to attract or
seems an ugly, unbreakable nut.
On the other hand, the poem that spills all its beans early
xiii
QUICKLY AGING HERE
in the game, one that hides no plot or argument (to say
nothing of technique which it rarely possesses to hide or
reveal) fails to draw me into a second reading. As beautiful
as tlieir sentiments might be, the Rod McKuen school of poets
strike me as belonging within this wide class. Like a flower,
tliey are easily taken apart; unlike tlie flower, such dissection
reveals no further mystery.
No claim here tliat this book contains the thirty-five best
unknoAvn poets of 1970. Instead, accept it as a representation
of some of the best poetry that was being written by un-
recognized poets during the last half of the 'sixties. It is
doubtful that any anthology, indeed any collection of anthol-
ogies, can adequately represent what is happening. At best,
books are published a year or more after their contents were
written; at best, the editors of anthologies make no absolutely
tragic omissions. And yet, while writing this I have the lurking
fear that somewhere in the group of more than 4000 poems
from which I made these selections, work that might change
the world was neglected. (“Might change the world!”— surely
I overstate the case; or could this be a function of poetrj'?)
I hope this book will demonstrate that poetry of merit is
being written faster than we can ever read it. Add to the
writers here those new poets who never submitted work and
those rejected largely because there wasn’t room, and one
begins to understand that anthologies of this nature reveal
only a fraction of what is happening below the surface. Like
a condensed book, anthologies are misleading. To rectify this,
I d suggest that readers note the magazines listed on the pages
that acknowledge reprint permissions; many (but surely not
all) of the best little magazines are named there; they need
the support of subscribers, and their writers deserve readers.
XIV
INTRODUCTION
Certainly, no library’ lias a true collection of contemporar)’’
writing wtliout tliem-for they get work into circulation
much, much sooner tlian the book publishers do.
Tire persistence of poets is a phenomenon; today’s poet
is a small grocer^' store squeezed between the A&P and Acme.
Rock groups learned to perform Ijoics with “meaning,” and
have captured the attention of a generation. The graphic
arts went pop and we were reminded that art can be enter-
taining. Poetr}', alas, is not so immediately entertaining— and
is miserably old-fashioned to boot. But the old grocerj' store
is charming, if inefBcient, and one has the feeling tliat long
after A&P and Acme merge. Dirty John wll still be mapping
the goods he sells individually, not in cellophane, and with-
out Muzak.
For eventually one becomes too old to mench his body to
the sounds of Purple Fig, and the graphic arts, in spite of
Time’s weekly Art section, are not often conveniently ac-
cessible. But before this can happen, one has to forget what
he’s learned about poetry in school. Tlie child is stuffed on
Wordswortli before he’s half digested Motlrer Goose. Poetry
is a chore, the burden of an educated society— sometliing that
one should somdiow love. This tiring to be loved has iambs,
spondees, trochees— all of which can be represented with
diagrams: put them in where they belong and rvrite an essay
on the second level of meaning. Where is the teacher who
admits that some poets are misfits, crackpots who would
be amazed if told of trochees that lurk between levels
of meaning? Maybe today’ s exploding population of poem-
writers is a reaction to the Poetry Month encountered in
XV
QUICKLY AGING HERE
in the game, one that hides no plot or argument (to say
notliing of technique which it rarely possesses to hide or
reveal) fails to draw me into a second reading. As beautiful
as their sentiments might be, the Rod McKuen school of poets
stf ke me as belonging within this wide class. Like a flower,
ey are easily taken apart; unlike the flower, such dissection
reveals no further myster>'.
No claim here that this book contains the thirty-five best
un nown poets of 1970. Instead, accept it as a representation
ot some of the best poetry that was being written by un-
recogmzed poets during the last half of the 'sixties. It is
doubtful that any anthologj', indeed any collection of anthol-
ogi^, can adequately represent what is happening. At best,
00' are published a year or more. after tlieir contents were
written; at best, the editors of anthologies make no absolutely
tragic omissions. And yet, while writing this I have the lurking
ear t ^ somewhere in the group of more than 4000 poems
om w ich I made these selections, work tliat might change
e world was neglected. (“Might change the world!”-surely
overstate t e case; or could this be a function of poetry? )
book will demonstrate that poetry of merit is
emg vmtten faster than we can ever read it. Add to the
^ ers ere t ose new poets who never submitted work and
those rejected largely because there wasn't room, and one
begins to understand that anthologies of this nature reveal
n Z happening below the surface. Like
I'd anthologies are misleading. To rectify this,
that note the magazines listed on the pages
oflr/w I*;?”"' many (but surely not
all I of the best little magazines arp j
the support of subscribers
7 and their waters deserve readers.
XIV
INTRODUCTION
Certainly, no librarj' lias a true collection of contemporary
^^•riting wthout them— for they get work into circulation
mudi, much sooner than the book publishers do.
Tire persistence of poets is a phenonrenon; today’s poet
is a small grocery store squeezed between the AS-P and Acme.
Rock groups learned to perform lyrics with "meaning,” and
have captured the attention of a generation. The graphic
arts went pop and we were reminded that art can be enter-
taining. Poetrj', alas, is not so immediately entertaining— and
is miserably old-fashioned to boot. But tire old grocery' store
is charming, if inefBcient, and one has the feeling tliat long
after A&P and Acme merge, Dirty' John will still be wrapping
the goods he sells indiridually, not in cellophane, and wth-
out Muzak.
For eventually one becomes too old to wench his body to
the sounds of Purple Fig, and tire graphic arts, in spite of
Time’s ueekly Art section, are not often conveniently ac-
cessible. But before this can happen, one has to forget what
he’s learned about poetry' in school. The child is stuffed on
Wordsworth before he’s half digested Mother Goose. Poetry
is a chore, the burden of an educated society— something that
one should somehow love. This tiring to be loved has iambs,
spondees, trochees— all of which can be represented rvith
diagrams: put them in where they belong and write an essay
on the second level of meaning. Where is the teacher who
admits that some poets are misfits, crackpots who would
be amazed if told of trochees that lurk between levels
of meaning? Maybe today’s exploding population of poem-
wnters is a reaction to the Poetry Month encountered in
XV
QUICKLY AGING HERE
nearly every literature course: the teachers have failed to prove
we can’t do better.
But Knott has said that the squabbling must stop, that as
in every human endeavor we must join together if we want
to continue. The old truths only sound like idealistic crap
because tliey’ve been said so often— but never tried out. It
seems that now we need more than poets who just write
poems. We surely need more than collections of quibbling
schools of poetry: the time for that is gone.
Quickly Aging Here indicates, I think, that Knott's recom-
mendations are already in practice. Notice the attention to
contemporary events, and 3'et the truly individual vision that
each poet brings to his concern. Wliat is needed beyond this
is a poetry that not only cries out for, but begins to show us
ow to Snd, peace and justice. Because, sadly enough, as
soon as you’ve finished reading or writing a poem, you return
to the uncorrected world that made the poem necessary. Tlie
destroyers are still in control. But the artist retains the power
of infiltration, of helping the madmen to see things straight.
April 1060
^ ^ GEOF HEWITT
XVI
for “lovers, teachers, plows, potatoes"
QUICKLY AGING HERE
Stan Rice
211
Floyce Alexander
221
Rochelle Ratner
229
Vi^illiam Witherup
254
Edgar Paiewonsky
242
Sand ford Lyne
249
Peter Fellowes
259
Colette Inez
266
'William Brown
275
Gerald Butler
28$
Dan Gillespie
294
Fanny Ilowe
304
Craig Sterry
315
Denis Johnson
323
Authors’ Notes
333
^adex of First Lines
3^9
for *‘loYerSj teachers, plows, potatoes'"
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
thanks to the followng people, whose advice
A R counted heavily in the mab'ng of this book:
. ^^Ammons, Marvin Bell, Ted Berrigan, Elliott Coleman,
Hi'toti Baxter Hathaway, George
Ot on^t’ "" ^^^tthavs, David Ray, and
ZsaZ rJ uZ° J^n^es, Ckudia
with mp T • ^ various others who were
peciallymyfemily!'^ ^
Here fb name.^^ Jotinson, w'ho gave QuicHy Aging
CONTENTS
Alfred Starr Hamilton i
Shirley Kaufman 13
Eric Torgersen 30
William Harmon 39
Philip Dow 51
Joseph Cardarelli 61
Coleman Barks 75
Sophia Castro-Leon 91
Dennis Trudell 98
David Hilton 111
Gregory Orr 124
Mary Ellen Solt 132
William Hathaway 137
Stephen Shrader 151
Raymond DiPalma & Stephen Shrader 161
hike 163
Susan Axelrod i6g
Stuart Peterfreund 180
Thomas Hanna 186
Barbara L. Greenberg 195
Don Shea 20$
xix
ACKNOWj
My d
and frie
211
A. R. A
C. Mic
221
Hitcha
Kc-"
::o
f
Ottone
Ansorg
Wtlll-i Withcrvp
with n
Ed;^r
2J2
pedal]-
I ar
Here
rdlms
Colciic kc:
;55
Willhm B‘0y^‘^‘
*75
Cchild Butler
:55
Ddn Gilksp'e
Fanny Idon'e
Craig Sterrv
PS
IX-'n/V Johnson
PS
/.‘■'/.'.vs’ Notes
535
•■ ■ / - ''' v.y; Lines
5^9
QUICaKLY AGING HERE
ALFRED STARR HAMILTON
Abroad
but
if it
isn’t
art
it’ll sue
you and I
and anyone else
and leave a long long
tell tale trail
behind itself
ALFRED STARR HAMILTON
April Lights
But nevertheless there are some other kinds of blue skies
Some other way of counting the summer clouds that stayed
There is the red moon, by October
Some other kind of February lights
Some other land of January darkness that is deeper
A bronze rake—
A winding road to where we are this evening
ALFRED STARR HAMILTON
Didn’t You Ever Search for Another Star?
L
did you say
August ponds
ought to have
been surrounded
by September fences?
but did you say
September fences
ought to have
been climbed over
by October peoples?
what did you say
for October padlocks
that ought never to have
been attached moreover
to November handcuffs?
II.
You 11 remember us for our dark Hungarian laughter
That tickled when it laughed, that dug at the limelight
Wiry, I’ll send you a dark silver Hungarian coin
From the mines that never saw the light of day yet
Why, 1 11 send you a dime’s worth of Hungarian damage
That has been done to a cave that is full of Rhapsody
QUICKLY AGING HERE
"Why, I'll send you a silver Icey to the cave of despair
I’ll send you a violet tonight, rU send you a silver sword
I'll send you a silver hanuner that'll hammer night and day
rU send j^ou a pail-ful of our kinds of blue revolutionarj' stars
III.
Who are you?
Weren’t you their prisoner in the sedge dark?
VvTiere has been your search for freedom?
Will you count the trees again in the dense w'oods
Wherever you have been tonight?
Wfll you look backwards where you have been?
And teU me whoever you are.
\^Tiat have been your escapes?
Nevertheless freedom is as ever an intense girl angel
That speaks to one in the inane rvildemess
Where has been your phantasmagoria?
Are the dark trees at war with the darklike trees?
Where has been your light
Where has been your sw'ordy well,
^\^lere has been your darldike table?
Didn’t you ever search for another star?
ALFRED STARR HAMILTON
Anything Remembered
One cloud, one day.
Came as a shadow in my life.
And then left, and came back again; and stayed
ALFRED STARR HAMILTON
"White Chimes
Gin is white, for a white while.
And of its soft white dreams
One pillows oneself;
One softens of oneself.
Comfortably one mirrors of oneself-
More comfortably one’s soft white dreams
Are more to do with Time, softspoken.
One loves wafting oneself away of soft’chimes
8
ALFRED
STARR HAMILTON
Psyche
but I don’t know
however it felt more like
scraping one’s spareribs
for whatever is left of
tlie moon at the bottom of the pan
9
ALFRED STARR HAMILTON
Moreso
Are you whistling
At the back of the dark hallway?
All I do know about dark life
About three rickety flights upstairs.
Are you barked at tonight
By a puppy? that would if he could
Have fed you all the dog biscuits
You wanted, or ever could have—
10
ALFRED STARR HAMILTON
town
Give US time
Give us crickets
Give us a clock
could you build this wonderful town house in the grass
and put a cricket in it by this evening?
11
ALFRED STARR HAMILTON
Guardian
Contrast Rooster’s white feathers
With the greater surrounding darkness
But he sings with all his blue might;
An iconoclast of old scoffs at the ghosts of the pastures.
Bespeaks of himself, stalks and struts in the eerie morning
moonlight;
But he sings with all his white might.
Because tnithfully he is our gentleman of the darkness,
” • Peeps pasture land, and morning miles away.
He IS the savior. He is tlie guardian of the new dawn
12
SHIRLEY KAUFMAN
'Watts
for Sabatino (Sam) Rodia, builder of the Towers, who died in Mar-
tinez, California July i6, 1965, before the riots
1
My friend who married the girl I
introduced him to after he felt
my breasts under the steering wheel
of his parents’ borrowed DeSoto,
and swims in a big jar
in the San Fernando Valley,
my friend who plucks tonsils
with manicured tweezers, and gave me
a Barlach woodcut of two agonized
women for my last birthday,
tells me
13
QUICKLY AGING HERE
he’s learning to shoot
with his children, teaching them how
with a gun, and last week
he hit tlie bull’s eye at fifty feet
twenty times out of twenty.
The son who sings in the choir
wins prizes. The youngest, a girl,
plays the flute and the cello.
The middle one studies hard.
^Vlly?
I ask
wanting to start over.
Why?
We all need a gun
in the house. Learn
to use one. The first time
I fired it, they jumped.
Now they love it. And Watts,
he says.
Tliink about Watts.
14
SHIRLEY KAUFMAN
2
Monday morning and the red garbage
truck shifts up the hill, jerking
like bones, like California
sliding in the sea.
Bent,
wth the big can strapped to his shoulder,
cigar in his teeth, tattoo on his arm,
and two flat boxes of slimy lettuce,
chicken bones, sardine cans,
used-up carbon stuck to his hands,
he climbs the path to the street
and heaves the dreck in.
M^at
do we keep?
Eyes, lips, heavy
drops on the neck, my friend
with his pool in his fists.
Sensibility,
he says,
I don’t know what that means.
Scatters the ■w'ater
from his wrists.
15
QUICKLY AGING HERE
3
I went to Watts to see
the Towers. To see the sky
come at me
in thin frames, bleached
by the bluer glass.
The Towers.
Flying like ladders, testing
a coolness that we never
reach.
As it I raised
myself into that breach, as if
I climbed on coiled springs
into air.
(Taylor over the keyboard
lifting
the sound so fast his hands
are spaces that the wind
pours through.)
Broken mirrors
and my face in parts,
the shapes of com ears,
baskets, one thin shoe.
16
SHIRLEY KAUFMAN
Thiity-tliiee years, Rodia,
card number 6719 in the International
Hod Carriers, Building and Common
Laborers’ Union, his blunt
trowel slapping the w'et cement,
twisting the hoops to let
the light come in, lifting
the junk, the junk
to spiresl
The way trees grow and slowly,
ring over ring.
Plates,
abalone shells, bottles,
lengths of pipe.
his death.
Against
17
QUICKLY AGING HERE
4
Guns in warm houses.
Rifles. Knives.
Glass
in the streets and bumed-out
doors.
Fm saving
finger nails, cut-off hair,
nothing that sticks or stays
the same, but still
it’s there. Shape of my lap
turned into something different
when I stand.
It grows.
Dead leaves and babies,
cancelled maps,
even
my shadows, reflections in water,
loose skin over each
knuckle of my hand.
18
SHIRLEY KAUFMAN
I Hear You
The promises of mother-
smiles, soft fingers
children could not touch.
You and your sisters
gliding like fish
(the tank was full
of your stare) to market
to market, sun
in your scarves, the ripple
of exquisite goiters.
You never wore a hat
except in mirrors,
your eyes were violet
under the veil,
under the knotted squares
calling me child.
But I went after you,
mother to mother,
put you together
when 5'our bones rode you
apart. Something
IQ
QUICKLY AGING j
Guns in warm 1
Rifles. Knives.
in the streets
doors.
Vv
finger nails
nothing tt
the same,,
it’s there
turned r
when I
Dead '
cancel
my si
loose'
t
knuc!
!
i
\
18
SHIRLEY KAUFMAN
I Hear You
The promises of mother-
smiles, soft fingers
children could not touch.
You and your sisters
gliding like fish
(the tank was full
of your stare) to market
to market, sun
in your scarves, the ripple
of exquisite goiters.
You never wore a hat
except in mirrors,
3'our eyes were violet
under the veil,
under the knotted squares
calling me child.
But I went after you,
mother to mother,
put you together
when your bones rode you
apart. Something
19
QUICKLY AGING HERE
was always breaking
down inside j'ou.
Save me, you sob
in a dream, but nobody
runs like a friend
to your door. And Fm
in my own garden this time,
digging a ditch
for my heart.
What
did you give me, mother,
that you want it back?
An empty book to put
my poems in, peeled
apples, Patsy dolls.
Each day I sucked
at your virtuous breasts
and I'm punished
anyhow.
20
SHIRLEY KAUFMAN
The Hunger
And the hunger
coils out of its cave
in the center,
sprouts out of the ribs
like fireworks,
comes to that naked other
hunger to hunger,
the back of the eye alive
witli two melons
under a wne.
Tlie hunger travels
an old horizon
to a dangerous feast
not yet prepared,
to a banquet
where someone is
sweeping crumbs
from the table
too soon,
to the fruit
false as children
who never
came back,
while the melons suck
their own juices
under the lind.
The little pale kernels
shake
in their dark
dome.
22
onii5.i-.iiJ- nnui: iviiiix
Room
O this is the creature that does not exist.
-Rilke
1
The sky can’t get in.
Or sun where you enter
the core of the wood.
Extravagant, bumed-out
trees. There is no
provision for darkness.
Shadows flow smooth
down your skin, and the skin
of the tree thickens.
You stretch to his face,
and the flesh of your ribs
grows into his arms.
You give whatever is
possible. After so many
forests. And you are
slowly what you are
in any light.
It happens
only when you give it
room. Tliat milky beast.
Fed on the chance
that it might be,
it is. Destructible
as anything that lasts.
23
2
Lights hum at the window
like hives opened out.
They swarm tlirough your head.
Tliey move in the dark
of his fingers finding
your breasts.
And laurel.
Changed back to woman,
more lavish than she
ever was. Who is he
sliding in your arms? "W^iat
will become of you?
3
Is it because he
told you what he dreamed?
Drawing a boat through
tlie fountain. Carefully.
Fontainebleau’s opulent
gardens. Or does it
grow to more than you
can manage as a game?
Every chateau in France.
Your belly is warm
24
and featlicrcd. His nioulh
is tasting your shoulder.
And the duch goes after
her babies in the pond.
Waking and waking and
waking, sou breathe
the light from his skin,
A swimmer whose anns lift
heavy, suddenly.
4
You are behind tire surface
of yourselves. His hand
strokes tire outside
of your hand. Your colder
skin, ^^^ly does it
cry each time
at the tense bone until
the flesh gives in?
Tire sun is over
the great park. He has
gone out of you.
25
It Stays
What fills this house,
slides under
the weather-stripping,
wagging branches
plugged with leaves
or buckled with fruit
will never be married.
If I grow friendly,
regard it calmly
as one strokes a child's
head talking to somebody
else, it leeches
in, breeding
its own disorder.
And if I lie dov/n
under it, make
it as real as what
I have become,
it grows around me,
shoves its way
into my arms.
Jasmine, we shake
the air and vines
catch fire.
Flesh of the inner
flower, eyes
above me coming
tlirough leaves.
Tlic old nibble of lies
in the dark, Nines
bursting fragrant
against my hair,
hurting my face.
Tliey climb the walls
like toads, open
their tropical mouths
crowded with roots,
sa>dng, you've got to
feed us, cracking
tlie paint, the plaster,
shaking me, nothing
I’ll ever tame.
Mothers, Daughters
Tlirough every night we hate,
preparing tire next day's
\^'ar. She bangs tire door.
Her face laps up my own
despair, the sour, brown eyes,
tire heavy hair she won't
tie bach. She’s cruel,
as if my private meanness
found a way to punish us.
We gnaw at each other's
skulls. Give me what's mine.
I’d haul her back, choking
myself in her, herself
in me. There is a book
called Faisons on her shelf.
Her room stinks with incense,
animal turds, hamsters
she strokes like silk. Tlrey
exercise on the bathroom
floor, and two drop through
the furnace vent. The whole
house smells of the accident.
tlie hot skins, tlic small
flesh rotting. Six days
we turn the gas up then
to fiy tlie dead. I'd hy
her head if I could until
she cried love, love mcl
AH she won’t let me do.
Her stringy figure in
tlie wndowed room shares
its thin bones mth no one.
Only her shadow on tlie glass
waits hke an older sister.
Now she stalks, leans forward,
concentrates merely on getting
from here to there. Her feet
are bare. I hear her breathe
where I can’t get in. If I
break through to her, she wall
d Ills into my tongue.
The Cage
1 .
It's a cage I'm building.
To put all the tigers in.
2 .
A man with a cage
has tigers.
They'll come out of the cage
to get me.
ERIC TORGERSEX
jensen: A Slideshow
I.
Lowercase jensen, that’s dangerous.
And true: he complains, fears barbershops,
trips over women, giggles; his grin
would hang in a man’s closet. But he
has his plans, no weakling’s.
Bom wth a beard and squint}’, sign
(and gun?) in hand, a Communist. Raised
to be nice, and he tried. To make humble ^^sits.
Praised like a tame coon, petted
but he stayed whiskery' inside.
jensen did eveiy-thing perfect, a regular
blind kid, and was secret. Grew eyes
in secret, afraid to see. He saw
a girl, she ran away, he dropped
his cane and ran after. By now
he stumbles like anyone, and more.
jensen’s habit was going home bitter
and early. He left
when they grew confusing, friends
got everything. Now he stays
smiling and late and not too drunk.
31
IL
He watches through crooked windows,
a kid watching. He knows
he deserves it: he saw something once,
someone he knew, and forgot. But looking
through crooked windows is art
in itself by now.
His car: he lives in it, knowing it’s noplace
to live in, but streets are becoming, sidewalks
naked. Walking (big coat, a spy)
he talks to himself, sings, stares, stumbles;
driving he’s bored, and he wants to be.
He’s blue-and-white, competent, busy;
it’s something to worry about, an office
to manage or family to look after, woman
he can handle.
Inspector jensen (big coat) always
at the scene; the mere presence comforts.
He tries reflections in every window, fretting.
He sees a lot, and (smilingly) is seen;
he has a theory, writes it all down
in a book. Tomorrow the case
breaks open, and he’s tall.
32
ERIC TORGERSEN
It happened to Mr. I’enscn
tlie teacher right in class (and the woman
left him, the elegant girl
who thought he could leach her something) .
He resigned from the students and Uie college
in secret, and stayed. Kept aslcing
his questions Uicy all could answer,
singing his funny songs about being friends,
dancing his dances, djang right in class
of ignorance. Good thing nobody
said something: saved his breath.
ni.
Dehnitively jensen: the unmistaheable
style to his defeats. He ships a little
dorni the wooden back steps (hands
still in his pockets, unloved almost
at dar^Ti) . He pauses a second
at the foot (to catch that precise
disappointment) . He leaves the driveway
with a quick smile and something
in his step that tells you it’s jensen
and he’s dancing.
I’m Married
—a letter to tlie folks
My wfe has tattoos on her neck
and queer, unmatching breasts.
She's very young, and plays
barbaric music on the radio.
She’s in the john now,
washing my socks in the bathtub
and singing to herself.
When I'm late at night
she comes and sits down on my lap
and scribbles on what I’m writing.
I’m very happy.
34
ERIC TORGERSEN
The Story of White Aiem heading Viet
Cong Patrol
— AP Dispatch, Dcs Moines Register, August 1968
The slain enemy resembled
an American Marine
who TOS 18 years old
when he disappeared.
The wolent episode
was one of the strangest
in tiiis strange wnr.
*
For a moment
the two young men—
the American Marine
and the white man
in the uniform of the enemj'—
35
stared at each other.
“He had an AK 47
automatic rifle
but he just looked at me.”
Gordon fired
after a moment’s hesitation.
Several of the Marines suspect
that the unknown white man
whom they call “the Caucasian”
could have shot first
but deliberately held fire.
At the debriefing
everyone was afraid
to say what they had seen.
ERIC TORGERSEN
Legends
1
They lived in elaborate systems
of caves, they worked all day,
they wrote long letters to friends
and married strangers.
A secret everyone knew was never
mentioned; old longings
to speak it troubled their sleep.
After long lives, they went on
writing their last wills and testaments
for years, till their last inspiration
expired.
2
They had no books to read, their lovemaking
was perfect, their wives were faithful
till they died. If they did not smile
it meant they were going to kill you.
From rock, they cut huge heads
shaped hke their own, and danced
in circles around them. At the height
of their fabulous health, still dancing,
they fell o£E their feet like statues.
37
WILLIAM HARMON
Six Sections from TREASURY HOLIDAY
xiii
Animals of the forest & plants of the field are friends to
me & I participate in their organization
I am measured in terms of trillions of dollars
& they understand the nature of husbandry & economy
I walk among the grown-up trees with their attendant vines
& rabbits mice & terrapins are with me in my celebration
& with me in my deep happiness
O may my heart's truth / still be sung / on this high hill
in a fiscal year’s turning.
39
WILLIAM HARMON
&
vice
versa
na
gas
a
ki
like
that
you
do
not
need
to
know
the
key
41
WILLIAM HARMON
xxix
Now
poem & month
both almost over
& done with;
riot in Detroit kills three dozen plus
white & black, & Mr. Brown of
the non-student violent disrupting committee
says We built country' & we bum it down
& Greece flat under a military dictatorship
Vietnam the same old can of C-ration worms
Red Guards katzenjammer second secretary of Indian embassy
Africa hitting the fan again
Smokey Garbuncle’s visiting communist countries
&’s now in Cuba libre swapping jests with those jerks
yeh yeh
O hot nights & sad days we count you off
& witness, witness
43
& now John
Coltranc dead
let me put that down
John Coltranc dead
man from High Point not far v,’cst of here
lived forty years of music
impossible music
what v'Ords what words?
O long
songs
Spiritual Chasin’ the Trane Giant Steps
Cousin Mary Countdown Spiral
Syceda's Song Flute Naima
Mr. P. C. India Up 'gainst the Wall
Impressions
After the Rain Afro-Blue Tlie Promise
Alabama Your Lady Big Nick
long songs
let the record play
44
WILLIAM HAKMON
ocxxii
31 July
So let the month end: the new fiscal year
is well underway
The earth machine is falling or fiving apart like usual
I plan my telewsion afternoon
Channel 5 — ^MOVIE — Drama
“The Garden of Allah.” (1936) A Trappist monk runs
aTOy to the desert where he meets a beautiful woman
who h^ gone there to find peace, Marlene Dietrich,
Charles Boyer.
tonight also on 5
“Salty O’Rourke.” (1945) A gambler who is readying
his horse for an important race falls in love with a pretty
teacher. Alan Ladd, Gail Russell,
until signoS Mth the national dittj' unsingable
& shots of troops lined up Mth Springfields at present-arms
& stars & stripes floating in the gale from paradise
Picture clicked oE shrinks to single bright point star of
light light years oE & then vanishes altogether
into the heart of the mother
nadmoder madmoder madmoder
meat mother muse money machine motor metal man me
madmoder
45
xxxiv
Calculation & belief it Came so huge
at CO ored cartoon Rodent could Nightmare or imagine It
carrot Carrot growing wide O Carrot wldly wildly
& bloody huge too over Polite city’s placid nursing
Landscape’s blah horizon
It came from Saturn’s purgatory Ring
It came from Ateulfus Icing of tlie wsigoths Assassinated at
■Barcelona in 415
R came from Mercury the w'nter Camp of Jesus trismegistus
^rom Peter pumpkin eater & Unkulunkulu
t came from the Home of tlie free recognizing F. Franco
on the Day of Fools in april 1939
It came from half-unlit Pee-green halls of Halitosis muscatel
Salvafaon & used sheiks that made light love Safe for
Deomoncratz & guildenstem
It came I tell you from tecumseh & Tenskwatawa
& Tashunca-uitco
From 1813 from 1834 & 1877
& from the poet prophet Priest Nezahualcoyotl forging Pre-
scnptions for teipin hydrate Elixir & Q-Tips & &quens
on red & Green gift-wrapping Paper in the lost Linen
Closet of an Oddfellows Hall in 1520 wth Luther ex-
coinmumcated by Leo X & Raphael & Montezuma II
It came from the Human Mind of Man & the Rosy burning
Sled of xanadu
Af? ^ midnight & Hide Pock
& Afnka koips & Enc’s popskull burden
46
WILLIAM HARMON
It came from Hubert Hubert Hubert & the deterministic
Urstratum of Quantum phenomena & the Belles of
birmingham memorizing Gin
It came from tlrose lordly king Solomon's orchids tlie xo
educated toes in Stalin’s burial socks
It came from 1953 & tlie girl Next Door
From Arnold Bax & pepsic Ulcers & tlie death of Scanderbeg
the albanian Chief in 1468
It came from Berg his concerto for Violin & orchestra
& from Pavane pour une Infante defunte & the kinderToten-
lieder
It came I say from 1935 & 1902 & 1899
From mux duRatt & young Lester leaping in & Supermarket
Sweepings & the Edoo variation
It came from Michelangelo’s statue of Malcolm x dying a
Sunday &KKKKaty
It came from Nebuchadrezzar in Jerusalem in 588 b. C.
It came from Jacqueline’s ruby queene pressed between the
Papers of the Yellow pages in Euclid in Ohio 0 god
From aldershot Principia & Plutonius XC & the Trilhon
Elizabeth asylum electricities
It came from Phatic communion & etlmical culture & Kor-
sakov’s Syndrome & Anal-sadistic pseudo-Names & All
the 1960s
From supersuds & the hysterical East following a star & bran-
clean from Engine Love Call & tlie hi-freak stainless-
Gold antennae of Troy’s DonaHue hairs in 1184 B. C.
It came a long way from Saint Francis
It came Express collect Emergency from the mood music of
Cosmo McMoon & from Tapoti— to the Melody of P’u
Sa Man written after the 4th Encirclement in February
1933
47
XXXIV
past all Calculation & belief it Came so huge
^Vliat colored cartoon Rodent could Niglitmare or imagine It
A carrot Carrot growng wilde O Carrot wildly wildly
& bloody huge too over Polite city’s placid nursing
Landscape’s blah horizon
It came from Saturn’s purgatory Ring
It came from Ataulfus king of tlie visigoths Assassinated at
Barcelona in 415
It came from Mercury tlie winter Camp of Jesus trismegistus
From Peter pumpkin eater & Unkulunkulu
It came from the Home of tlie free recognizing F. Franco
on the Day of Fools in april 1939
It came from half-unlit Pee-green halls of Halitosis muscatel
Salvation & used sheiks that made light love Safe for
Deomoncratz & guildenstem
It came I tell you from tecumseh & Tenskwatawa
& Tashunca-uitco
From 1813 from 1834 & 1877
& from the poet prophet Priest Nezahualcoyotl forging Pre-
scriptions for terpin hydrate Elixir & Q-Tips & C-quens
on red & Green gift-wrapping Paper in the lost Linen
Closet of an Oddfellows Hall in 1520 with Luther ex-
communicated by Leo X & Raphael & Montezuma II
dead
It came from the Human Mind of Man & the Rosy burning
oled of Xanadu
milk & Celery Stalks at midnight & Hide Pock
& Afnka korps & Eric’s popskull burden
46
WILLIAM HARMON
It Came from Hubert Hubert Hubert & the deterministic
Urstratum of Quantum phenomena & the Belles of
birmingham memorizing Gin
It came from those lordly king Solomon’s orchids tlie lO
educated toes in Stalin’s burial socles
It came from 1953 Sr the girl Next Door
From Arnold Bax & pepsic Ulcers & tlie death of Scanderbeg
the albanian Chief in 1468
It came from Berg his concerto for Violin & orchestra
& from Pavane pour une Infante ddfunte & the kinderToten-
lieder
It came I say from 193 5 & 1902 & 1899
From mux duRatt & young Lester leaping in & Supermarket
Sweepings & the Edoo variation
It came from Michelangelo’s statue of Malcolm x dying a
Sunday & K K K Katy
It came from Nebuchadrezzar in Jerusalem in 588 b. C.
It came from Jacqueline’s ruby queene pressed between the
Papers of the Yellow pages in Euclid in Ohio o god
From aldershot Principia & Plutonius XC & the Trillion
Elizabeth asylum electricities
It came from Phatic communion & etlrnical culture & Kor-
sakov’s Syndrome & Anal-sadistic pseudo-Names & All
the 1960s
From supersuds & the hysterical East following a star & bran-
clean from Engine Love Call & the hi-freak stainless-
Gold antennae of Troy’s DonaHue hairs in 1184 B. C.
It came a long way from Saint Francis
It came Express collect Emergency from the mood music of
Cosmo McMoon & from Tapoti-to the Melody of P’u
Sa Man written after the 4th Encirclement in February
1933
47
It came from Pink Pills for Pale People & Tlie Blues To End
All Blues & farcing Milky Ways & Baby ruths & from the
Universal International harvester His Self
& from Aix-les-bains & algemon Bray & ARVN & cheeky Bob
& Bradshaw of the Future & B, Sudrez Lynch on 24 May
1881 the most Beautiful easter in the memory of Man
From J. J. Fux & Bust her Brown & remote control Cola's
Norbert the Wiener & the megalopolice of Babeloan
It came from Edgar d Perry & Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke
on 2 December 1793 & Mary midnight & Mister Lun
& zosimus zephyr & ferdinando's Foot & Ebenezer Car-
dinal Pentweazle & Martinus Macularius & Quibus
Flestrin & the Female student & Mark Twain
It came from bloomfountain of Vesuvius petroleum & New
South Wails & the Briddish crown colon of Watts in
California & The Hekiganroku
Came riding tall on the Back of a Limerick pig made of
steel wearing this long flowing Dirty white Robe wth
Magic marker scenes of the Rape of Antarctica
It came to Me my melancholy Baby drinks too much & gruen
Ticks
O it came from a Rose
It came from a Yes
It came from the Automon Umpyre & Sow-Jet union castro-
nuts & Metacomet cleanser & Lifey's butter-dream of
Detroit barbecue Ritz with the Blue Lights On
It came from the Dried-up Lips of mister Cornelius McGil-
licuddy of the old Philadelphia athaletics Baseball or-
ganization
It tame tause see im a dood dallar in odle sings, iss & so im
Dd too. Gd bless MD & FW & Me, ay & pdfr too. fare-
well MD MD MD FW FW FW Me Me
48
Came from the Top & Vo nguyen giap & tlie Dalkey archive
& Engelbeng humperdumhp & simon garfunlcel & Tender
Loins & the Mom of Golly
It came leaping blubber lubber from the Innard slick of
Moby Finn •
From fitch shampoo & billiard Greens & Moon the muUins
Is come from the Sixtieth chapter of the Book of Isaiah
It came from Johannes de Silentio Copenhagen 1843 & Maca-
pagal in Malacanang & 2-way Inventions for simulated
limousine & Yokum Von ribbentrop in F-cup Major
It came from all future Prologomena
From I say Teapot Dome U70ming & that Crowd of aristo-
crats fornicating their Monocles & orders off in the pule
at Cliveden & in the weeping stoneflint waters of tlie
Pedemales a River in hell
It came from Oppenheimer seeing Sanskrit in the A-boom
blossom & Wild turkey drink & Quail Roost noble Prim-
rose of the Mfing Sisters
It came from Tennessee Ernie & the San Kenton choir doing
A Mighty fortress
It came one uncertain April day with Operation PLUTO
defunct in Pigs' bay & from blonded Bombshells dead
in bed of Ovadoses of Selluloid & from the Eightfold
quark
From the protocols of Dayan & wonderings of Ossian & deficit
Spending & the Lysol Gap & money glands & plus fours
& Jackson Pollock's unimaginable Genius pissing back
& Forth & round & round in Peggy's gugenheim Fire
& the Field of the Gloth of Gold
It came about Ten Thousand Years ago from the follicles of
Montgomery sutra & red squares & the Shankletown
strutters' Prince of Denmark march
From new mexico Time’s picayune & the Great Speckle Odes
It came mad from Cro-magnon Adam man & Woman in cool
Booth of Musak shopping sinner cock-tail Lounge open
24 hours the day No cover no minimum no limit until
the Cops came & Locke came
It came I was Alone I should have known
& it came to pass that Moroni was angry with the Government
because of their Indifference concerning the Freedom
of their Country about B.C. 62
It came a-frugging from the Forbidden City of honolulu Bur-
lesque O god in heaven All Mighty that naked woman
music & jaaz-physics There
From biograph & Texas Theatre & harley & Davidson & the
Credit mobilier of Americard & Star & garter Chamber
& the Gross National Manifest destiny
It came from Finnegans final Fall & all & mikrokosmos
Hellzapoppin Gotterdammerung
It came from them
Him me you
O go down
On our
Knees
now
50
Early Morning
The solitary egret
in a field of new barley.
I think of the loneliness
of angels— lacking even
the body of a shadow
to share.
Morning, in the Pastures Near Suisun
The sun gathers
last night's rain
we follow
picking mushrooms
in cowshit
Drunk Last Night with Poets, I Go to Work
Anyway
The boss knows what shape I'm in. He tells me
about tlie twenties, when he was my age,
how he drank all night and woke up in strange rooms
with strange dolls. He tells me to get lost.
Out back is a bank of weeds I’ve never noticed,
and I head for tliem in the cold air, remembering
dogs and" cats eating grass when sick.
Beneath a sky of leaves, in green air. Black Beetles
shoulder enormous stems. Quicksilver
dew quivers between leaf and stem. Through forests
of moss, I see ants tiny as salt grains
and budding red flowers smaller than these ants.
A snail dreams in the throat of an old wine bottle.
I kneel shoulder deep, careful to disturb no one.
There’s a shoutl Two kids straggle a tire
upslope and let go. Then-lag on the wire fence,
arms hung around each other’s neck, wondering
‘ what I’ve found— the tire still going. Beyond,
the bruised and swollen clouds change shape
with sudden light.
Fora Happy Girl
She is like a cricket:
singing all night
With her legs.
54
Our Garden
My love sometimes malces her shrill.
I’ve imagined leaving her and our sons
for the life I deser\fe
and should have had ten years ago
(and wasn’t ready for) .
Tonight the four year old jumped in the
clothes and all
to mestle me,
we helped his little brother in.
We laughed and she mopped the floor.
I know they owe me nothing,
demand everything,
and trust.
And I could never understand
how a man could prune his tree
in hope of greater yield.
Death
is patiently
making my mask as I sleep.
Each monung I awake
to discover in the comers of my eyes
the small tears of his wax.
56
HILIP DOW
The Life of the Poet
The poet is hunchbacked
hy his heart
swollen nath dreams
of wngs, of girls whose breasts are antelope
trembling beneatli the lightning
that seeds his spring; he hears the bones
of their unborn children
growing.
In this hut of his heart he lives,
and does not know if it has a door,
a mute eating crimson flowers
to make a scream, that keeps saying:
what does this do
to save my life?
His words stall for time,
slave for the mortgage on his bones;
he knows he is the fool
who cannot solve itl
yet, he goes at his heart over and over
repairing; with jellyfish, Ian
whistles, white cords of his
seeking colors, odors of damp alleys,
odor of knives.
le horses,
body, white moths
PHILIP DOW
Bats
Less than Angelic
Souls who evaded life
Flying in fits
Blind to Heaven’s light and Earth’s
They flee to an insect portion
Twisting from their echoes
Pitchpipes of grief
JOSEPH CARDARELLI
Not Writing
Just finger prints and drool
where I dozed off on my paper
to someplace in my head
where she is nameless
forever, where
I am blind and speechless
travehng to her from steam
through glazes
that rise from her mind
There are speeches of light
in aquatic temples
diamond blades of black velvet fangs
reflections on gold givers—
I wake to dreams I can’t control
61
QUICKLY AGING HERE
trees, stumped, putting out tiny wings
of translucent new leaves anyway.
Listening to twilight schools of spooky minnows
tuning their scales, he has got the drift
of this sea he lives in;
in nights’s sea of star-
fish that stops all eyes
he sees the boats go on,
overhead, with cargoes of ocarinas
and red melons—
Swimming to any shore, he finds himself
there, already, with his black horse
and his cart, heaped with salt,
paying back the sea.
60
JOSEPH CARDARELLI
Refrain
We are two people
Sharing the same bed;
I remember the twin beds
and the diverse timetables.
When your teeth grind,
I would share your shaggy nightmare,
I move closer to you.
We are rivo people
Ticking at the supper table;
— the sudden evening pushed us
into awkward chairs.
The knives scrape the ceramic plates.
I would caress your acid breast.
I nudge your foot.
We are two people.
62
JOSEPH CARDARELLI
Seeing such things
through bhstered row endows
\Yhite panes, wrinMed pink walls
Eyes that possess me
hand of understanding
emptiness that brings no shame
Wife, Ywdow, teeny hopper
Restrained sighs
claw tracks in my shoulders
Oh°ll Mother!, is that what I’m doing
is it my fault
that I don’t grow sleepy
you are grand and I’m not afraid
to say it
sugar comes in all forms
they are your red silk pants
for heavens sake your scent
I’m no fool to smell it
Smells like parsley, pepperoni
1 feel you
move beneath me fine stroke hands
65
JOSEPH CARDARELLI
The trip for hell and self
—Matter is veiled life, Life is veiled mind
Must have begun through Friday
noon I ran
to greet you Spring was freaking
me out. The asphalt walks, soft grass
and silver
Paris necklace. Again you dressed in puiple.
Mexican wrought hand
silver, your
eyes are blue, that a fine man
gave you. I’ll drive your
old sedan
on a quest for gypsies
to read the smooth wet palms
to give up
our habits of eyes meeting
64
The whole thing’s a ritual isn’t it?
the red lead city
like a fungus before me
JOSEPH GARDARELLI
On Blindness
Smell tlie rug. Smell the wire that holds the chair together.
Taste my writing.
Smell the flesh on which I work my magic spell.
It is impossible to write; too many themes and senses
Super heroes
Ego hangups and needs to walk about mumbling Kill, Kill.
We are all going to kill someone. Killing is the
way. of life.
Notice the line form of this poem. Should one kill one’s self?
It is too easy to kill one’s self. No, that is not it.
It is much too hard.
Live hard; sit on top of the world; go down like a legend.
Waste time, Oh waste time. There was a time
when I could watch
the tide go, could watch the tide go by.
Feel the rug. Feel the wire that holds the chair together.
Hear me \vrite.
Feel the flesh on which I work this magic spell.
67
QUICKLY AGING HERE
you must be mountain air
in this poem
I hiss your breasts
your nipple rises firmly while
I suck it
and press your plastic buttocks
So we can not even be friends I wish
to kill you
^Vhat does it mean to say we are lovers
and how can I make this message felt
these things are dreams
that steam away with light
and I am water left for sipping.
66
OSEPH CAEDARELLI
Hopeless thousands left just yesterday.
I’ve news today our leaders' graves are
robbed,
and countless fools on ramparts
shout their notions.
Aye, yes, she has cast
that same jeweled dagger to my cbest,
. but were I once more young
I would have her again.
II. (the talk of the two friends)
The wolves howling overhead at night
make sorrowful noise in the fields,
books are read and reread,
and wnd whistles through cracked windows.
Whole nations squabble in patriotic grandeurs
and on their limits, as on the lace trimmed hem,
and in their depth, as in contact,
—the love of that final moment,
we have both dwelt, a while.
Soon castles are built and are rubbled,
sand drifts where blue flowers grew,
and walks by the sea are found useless.
JOSEPH CARDAE.ELLI
To Rimbaud in Hell
I. (the encounter)
When last I walked tliere,
not quite unlike you my brother,
it was indeed as you have said,
and at times quite different.
Spider webs gh'stened in tiie mornings,
after rains, after miraculous nights
and the one \vith large eyes,
—I am sure you knew her,
still runs in the evening in flowing sheer gowns.
You are mentioned at times,
now here, now there,
perhaps too often, too easily I fear,
but alone now, finally, it bothers me
little.
I had hoped of late
to follow you to Africa,
but as you see me here speaking,
there is no more need for those
drunken crusades.
68
JOSEPH CARDARELLI
from THE MARLBOROUGH POEMS
Rose do you know
the Marlborough
Do you know The Marlborough
Rose
Rose
I see myself in rooms
with creatures who think
they are strange
One room shows
a fur coat, gloves
& boots of spotted tiger
a sword, candles & cutting table
Please take care
of those ancestors
who glow with sorrow
One room is hung with my bones
Old ladies walk close halls
that leak rain the wind blows
Rose do you know
My rooms in The Marlborough
71
QUICKLY AGING HERE
for tlie hunger, and ritual are gone.
Tire church has grown thin.
Seldom leaves its perch by night,
makes long flights in quest of fat,
and rattles its bones at sounds in the attic.
There is little, save rotten meat,
powdered rock and the rust of iron facades,
with which to fill out stomachs,
empty as the place wherein we stand.
III. (the separation)
In this dark place, as in past bone caverns,
random draughts pull and point apart.
In this humble way I raise my hand in gesture
to salute tliis meeting and await its passing return.
Many await you,
I have naught else to say
while they sit in sleep, grit their teeth,
and wring their haunted hands.
70
JOSEPH CARDARELLl
Waiting for Lunch
He’s been sick
and waits for lunch sitting in bed
’SVbat’ll it be today
Tuna fish, yesterday’s lamb
Vegetable soup, something weird?
He takes coke. His finger probes
a bloated belly yellow below
The navel. He has nothing
To say. Friends of the family come
\Vith eyes poking about the sickroom.
They’re looking for germs.
Mrs. Gnarler drew some up
Her twitching nose.
His nakedness shakes the
Friends and the family.
The pale mark sheets have been exposed
and late at night they've heard him laughing.
73
QUICKLY AGING HEKE
Rose ghosts who
float in loose robes
inhabit The Marlborough
Rose
2. (Roof of the Marlborough)
At the end of an evening
discussing the bardos
with a traveling friend
it occurred that
the roof of my building
was not far above.
Legs like rubberbands
we shook with speed
climbing stairs nearby
unknown, used by few people
to catch dawn flashing;
Green about the old machinery
Violet pulsing through the maze below
we felt clear light of morning
raise our hair.
72
COLEMAN BARKS
Finger of Necessity
Postal Area. #29, Los Angeles
Twice recently young girls have
given me the finger. The
first was on the freeway, she
sitting close to her boyfriend turned
with sure purpose and aimed
at prominence, seatbelted in
two lanes over. The chemical shock to
my system made me feel so
like they wanted I chased them
for miles trying to think of something
to yell back. The second a few
minutes ago standing beside a
drugstore would have been easy to
go back by but I just waved
like oh another one. It must
JOSEPH CARDARELLI
Zombie
He’s oflF somewhere
is what
his old friends say
When their eyes can’t
meet his
while they’re talking
Associates & strangers
say he’s
bold though somewhat ashen.
He is confused
and talks
to them like a batlrroom
Mirror. He does not
know where
they are caught.
74
Stars. His eyes grow
brighter
& see through them
COLEMAN BAEKS
The Oracle
Do not ask of me
I am the hooded one
We are here to consult the entrails
for your departure.
About my cave are several signs of life
on the verge of their future
which may he read collectively or not
according to your mood.
Notice that I have no scroll or prepared text
as we approach the first enigma.
This squashed pigeon says one thing,
You are still young
And this black mule, still bubbling.
Do not submit yourself
to your own mind
Upon the cistern ledge this fish
inside a fish inside a fish records that
Life is passed
in the simplest of circles
not in the expanding universe
where everyone’s mythologies overlap
71
be something in the atmosphere, Scorpio
on the ascendant, or maybe they
were bored with the just looking
and better this than what I didn't give,
much better. With one buzzoff
finger she became the mother
of my invention with her red
shirt and her hiphuggers
and her flowered vinyl belt:
Hey cat lady, you eat it.
76
COLEMAN BARKS
From: body poems
Stomach
lunch paper sinking
into
the lake surface
tire lake bottom
sleeping frogs
snapping turtles
Elbow
cradling my funnybone
like a child
I didn’t mean to hit:
the dull ache, the surprise
at kissing myself
there
79
And the wormy goat stomach,
what do you think it means. Look closer.
What do you think?
It is a simple admission that
All advice is vague
and plagiarized
Ah, look, they fly, they fly away,
my beautiful birds, my guUs . . .
an omen of another sort which means,
A number of changes will come
and leave you depressed
The fire there which, as you see, is going out
will go out, and this garbage will begin to rot
tomorrow, which all means something else again.
We shall be left with fragments
of an order that is not our own
And as you pack these secrets up
and leave me here among my vitals
with a lot of emptied animals,
I must insist that you mean well.
78
COLEMAN BARKS
Ear Lobe
Suck Creek, Lover’s Leap
(we all know
what happens there)
Forehead
the two main lines
of your palm 6t
exactly over the ones
at the top of the
bridge of your nose:
what have you forgotten
Skull
a folk remedy
for the lovesick:
share a meal
of turtle meat
then tack the shell up
for a birdhouse
QUICKLY AGING HERE
Scar
the one chance
I will ever have
to go to Finland
is a long lake
frozen to my leg
Inner Ear
the girl on the dime
gets off one night
and meets me there
Bags Under the Eyes
the turnaround place
at the end of a lovers' lane:
why is that car coming back
82
COLEMAN BARKS
The Truckdriver
a man surprising himself
with care for somebody
who is
out of sight if there at all
what is it
(some mother’s charm
against the highway)
makes him take time
in this dark
the sun is four broken lines
on the pavement
like electric fencing
tuck in your feet
there’s nothing showing
of two children
in a big cardboard box
standing in the righthand lane
of NC 64 going north
outside of Hendersonville
when a carwind goes by
hold it down from inside
83
QUICKLY AGING HEKE
this is our house
to be safe in
and afraid together
before the truckdriyer
mil sJdd to the near shoulder
slam his door and uncover its
like a news item
he wll be a father
closed up in a cab
full of too much light
who thinks in the second
instant of seeing it ahead:
my anger my horsepower
would barrel through
dogs & cows piles of brush
& rows of boxes
anytime but now
on this morning:
a searching sound like a crownfire
of love and sheer luck (wind and, dry branch)
runs with my ignition
84
COLEMAN BARKS
'Nickajack Cave
Your recollection bums in my lantern,
shadows me down tliis ancient tufted ear.
h'ly eyes relax in darkness for your sight.
Aly hands touch stone that wears water
and I am almost out of sight now almost
gone, but listen for me. I mean to be lost
for years surviving to come out somewhere
telling a tomfool story to filling stations
and chenille shops who will have heard it
before: beneath this place your version,
you long drink of water, is yodeling
like a bloodstream, garbled sleeping sound.
You are here beside me wondering
if I know where I’m going. You are
there inside singing to a swarming
room. You are the survivor who
found another way out. Tire cave
itself is nothing but your skull.
You take me past the ribs and kelson
85
QUICKLY AGING HERE
of a pleasure boat through the broken
teeth of an admission stile to where
the audiences don’t remember you
with bear hugs for a stranger— to
blank holes filled with history:
the Nickajack tribe and the Union troops
and myself fallen shattered from the ceiling.
You stand with me like sleeping rubble
dreaming of form and you nap in these
cubbyholes hanging upside down
folded in a brotherhood of yourself.
This cave confuses us. Meld of rock
and dung and water. Our voices blend
in a noise that tumbles the lock
of the hill and lets us out— in a
chord that starts the sacred harp again
humming in the earth like a dynamo:
What wondrous love is this
O my soul O my soul
86
COLEMAN BARKS
Feather River Valley, 1956
mowng with her
above the stream sound
held by the 4x4 stilts
underneath the dance floor
at the back of the restaurant bar
stuck out over the water
I was learning
I am learning
what she has to do mth laughing
(that old sound
forming under the floor)
on the kitchen stool
my wife is
another culvertful
of laughing waters
(Minnehaha)
the same substance
the same rushing away
of a dark watery time:
so in the slippery bank sound
aU the people-ducks begin
COLEMAN BARKS
Choosing
for Kittsu
Floating with your head back
up to the ears in a river
you can hear a lot of lives
you didn’t expect: an outboard motor
starting up beyond your sight
somebody’s sinker taps against a drum
two kids are yelling mouthfuls
In the general flow
are sounds you might make yourself
and ones you can only imagine:
garfish moving along the bottom
water moccasins curling into tree roots
Chickamauga Dam upstream
imperceptibly ghang way
Half in air half in water
your eyes awake your ears adream
with soundings the mind can bob
and understand where it is
88
COLEMAN BARKS
Alone on the shining surface
buoyed up wife creatures
in such a dangerous sleep
I have created children taldng chances
underwater at nigbt
edging wife their fingers along fee bluff
above fee river jumping barefooted
into a cellar fuU of broken glass
And one recurring child too young to know
whaf s risky on a ledge
curious only about me down here
too far avray to reach him w'here he turns
like a dummy falling lands flat on his back
each ni^t on fee mattress pile of my choice
Safer in my dreams than in his
and falling more certain of love
then the tiny fishlike fact he was
when both of us forgot he might exist
a strange bit of marine life sticking
there on its owm bringing up questions
of freewill and time and the possibilities
that we broke
against the motel minor
in plain water glasses throwm to curse
and celebrate our combining image
89
SOPHIA CASTRO-LEON
Again Beginning
late
a storm of birds
wind under the branches
a scythe
lying in the fields
a road cold
wnd
cutting my eyes
yellow horizon line
and crystals forming
waiving inside
the lochs of hurt
held in the throat
the chink of stone
in so many of the words
92
SOPHIA CASTRO-LEON
Messages
Weeds in summer
a wolf call over the tranches
rain
and the pouring of loneliness
into silver threads
the tree’s darlc bark
and yellow in the wind
a call in the meadow
for mating
the quick silver charge at dawn
mist rises from water
around bark
from my mouth
teh the dawn
wings fly
battles cease
the skin
of this morning water’s
still clearness
is enough
SOPHIA CASTRO-LEON
Soft Rain
Tlie lines beyond
the mist
are pale enough
We hold
something like a heartbeat
there is tliis flutter
in our hands
that understands water
94
SOPHIA CASTRO-LEON
The Eye
Silence
we are given
ladders
find no end
to walls
then a long time—
Diamonds are cut
in the eye
of the absurd
a deer moves under snow leaves
SOPHIA CASTRO-LEON
A Letter
The wind
skims down the path
I have decided to live
at the edge of an old wood
Be5'ond the compression
of the smallest stone
an angel bleeds
It is winter
The white' memories
of your caresses
clip the edge of nerves
The fire colors
stay lit in the bones
If you come this spring
bring the morning wood
rolled in your breath
Come by the bend around the fences
where there’s sunlight
in the pockets formed by the trees
Under the tongue of wind
that comes wet
from the ocean
96
SOPHIA CASTRO-LEON
Turning
Don’t leave
wait
until the hawk
gets off my head
there is the light of a flood lamp
and black walls
a late voice
consents
Bright masses of flowers
erasing the mind
in the larynx
a wolf gate closes
Noon
light
slips over the mountain stone
past shade
the sound of water
fools
make cages
97
DENNIS TRUDELL
The Art of Poetry
You can say anything.
That a young marine charging up a sand incline at Saipan
suddenly thought of mittens on a string.
That after hours in the museum
all is quiet; the Rubens in Trafalgar Square,
for example, stay well within their frames.
That the lake of the mind no longer at civil war
must be lovely and quiet, with delightful small fish
nibbling near the surface.
That Rasputin's toenails
must have been clipped by someone:
where are such traces now?
That the impossible sea
is heaving tonight at the flanks
of a ship with lights and music . . .
of many ships, carrying an unguessable number
of indiscretions, and not a few smokers
considering the jump.
That a flagpole doesn't care —
how silly to march past it on a fine Tuesday
in a small group dressed the same
and hitting the left feet at approximately the same instant.
That the air above your sleeping son's head
is as holy as rain.
98
DENNIS TRUDELL
That notliing is perfect: an unpleasant woman
said on tele\dsion tonight I should think of my stink.
That the next person you turn to
may be the only one you’ll ever have a chance
to love more than yourself.
That a statue is not a fiesta.
That the snow makes so little noise.
That a car goes by. Slows down, stops, backs up.
Pauses, the motor whirring— and drives off.
It is midnight and October in America.
The small to\vns are left to the leaves.
DENNIS TRUDELL
The Guest
If one day you are walking along
and suddenly decide to ring the bell
of a lower left flat near the center
of the city, and you do, and a woman
in a paisley housedress ansu'ers, asks
what you w'ant and you can't think of
anything to say, just stand there
until finally she smiles, says you
must be Margie’s friend and Margie
ain’t home yet from whatchacallit,
beaut>' school, come inside and W'ait,
and you walk into a coflSny parlor,
nod at a chairbound old crone who
smells like w'et carpets, sit paging
Life for May 7, 1963 and listening
to the paisley woman w-onder from
the kitchen w'hether you've ate 3'et
and enjoy sauerkraut— and as you
say no you haven't and 3^es you do,
although 3'ou hate it, the door opens
and a girl in white with improbably-
colored hair, gum, and a rather nice
figure comes in, saj's hi and j'ou say
hi and start to introduce 5'ourself
W'hen j'ou hear the housedress coming,
ask instead to use the bathroom,
and follow the shrug and forefinger
into the dining room (nodding at
100
DENNIS TRUDELL
the paisley on the way), then duck
into the kitchen, out the back door,
and into the crowded kitchen across
the hall— whose door happens to be
open and where some sort of family
reunion or something is going on
and a female NCO-type is urging
everj'one to come in and be seated,
and so you follow into the adjoining
room, are seated, and shirt helping
yourself from various bowls handed
round, meanwhile making small talk
with those on each side, a fat man
with a cold and a woman who suspects
her son has not married wisely,
and joining in the general laughter
at the jokes of a homy-looking man
spilling food at the far end— which
proves a mistake because as your
head is back in mirth, a hard roll
smotes you on the shoulder and you
can’t decide whether it was thrown
by the small boy behind the peas
or the thirtyish woman with slattern
eyes who keeps looking over at you,
and who either by design or accident
slips into the chair on your right
when dessert is over and everj'body
is herded into an ashtrayed parlor
to watch slides of the host’s recent
trip to Columbus, Ohio: which slides
10
QUICKLY AGING HERE
go on and on until you begin losing
interest and stick your hand up into
the beam of light and start making
shadow animal heads while everyone
either laughs or whispers “Ssshh”
and the host says “Okay, let’s knock
it off,” but you don’t and he says
it a couple of more times and you
hear even the homy-looking fellow
and the small boy and tire woman
ndth slattern eyes join in wth
“Hey, enough is enough” and so on,
but you keep doing it until the host
moves cursing to a wall and turns
on the overhead light just as you
softly click the front door shut
and hurry across the hallway
to knock upon its twin.
102
DENNIS TRUDELL
Gambol
November— but the tONvn
is \Yarm and shines. Sunday
morning, Pennsylvania. Tlie
fronts of these white houses.
Follow the cracked side\ralk
to the river, where dead leaves
have been moving downstream
all night, are still
moving . . .
But the light makes where
they’re headed bounce like
coins. Think of balloons. Fresh
air moves tlirough my heart.
Juices the old wanting
to be in Paris— or maybe,
since the TV show I watched
while burping my month-old son
had leprechauns, in Dublin . . .
103
QUICKLY AGING HERE
My wife, one month a mother,
watched us from the sofa.
She’s back there rocking him.
I go for the Sunday paper.
To be in Paris . . . but the sun
on a bit of Pennsylvania weed
is also nice. Think of porches.
Sing ah well— nobody has it
all; this is most of it.
104
DENNIS TRUDELL
Going to Pittsburgh
In and between the cities
the go-go girls are bluffing.
They really will not step down
and lie on a corner table.
The men prefer the ones
who look most like coeds.
The men have come there
from factories or softball.
Their eyes do not love
one another’s eyes; their
wives or girlfriends are home
103
QUICKLY AGING HERE
changing sheets or channels.
Tlieir in-lavvs fail to
understand them, their sons
wear faggoty hair — Something
is hungry; it is not fed.
In and between the cities
the night is ungenerous.
The pizza and hamburgers
are thin; hitchhikers freeze.
The car-hops don’t jounce.
The motels are unfriendly,
their flies bite. Their walls
are sick of self-abortions.
Something is hungry; it is
not fed — In the soft suburbs
the martinis aren’t working.
The heads of industry are sad.
Their candidates don’t win.
Their alma maters won’t let
them re-enroll; their suicide
notes have comma splices.
106
-DENNIS TRUDELL
In and between the cities
the stares of the blacks
are causing cigarette bums
in beds of the middle class.
The husbands do not know
how to load the small arms
they have bought for summer.
They think often of Sweden.
They think that in rooms
behind drapes in Negro bars
the Navajos learn karate.
They fear for their stereos.
Something in and between
the cities is hungry; it is
not fed. This is no season
to learn the names of birds—
It is no time for tlrat.
DENNIS TRUDELL
The Jump Shooter
Tlie way the ball
hung there
against the blue or purple
one night last week
across to\TO
at the playground where
I had gone to spare
my wife
from the mood Fd swallowed
and saw in the dusk
a stranger
shooting baskets a few
years older maybe
thirty-five
and overweight a little
beer belly saw him
shooting there
and joined him didn’t
ask or anything simply
went over
picked off a rebound
108
DENNIS TRUDELL
and hooked it back up
while he
smiled I nodded and for
ten minutes or so we
took turns
taking shots and the thing
is neither of us said
a word
and this fellow who’s
too heavy now and slow
to play
for any team still had
the old touch seldom
ever missed
kept moving further out
and finally his t-shirt
a gray
and fuzzy blur I stood
under the rim could
almost hear
a high school cheer
QUICKLY AGING HERE
begin and fill a gym
while wooden
bleachers rocked he made
three in a row from
twenty feet
moved back two steps
faked out a patch
of darkness
arched another one and
tlie way the ball
hung there
against the blue or purple
then suddenly filled
the net
made me wave goodbye
breathe deeply and begin
to whistle
as I walked back home.
110
DAVID HILTON
The Poet Tries to Turn in His Jock
The way I see it, is that when
I step out on that court and feel
inside that I can’t mahe the plays,
it’ll be time to call it quits.
—Elgin Baylor
Going up for the jump shot.
Giving the kid the head-fakes and all
’Til he’s jocked right out the door of the gym
And I’m free at the top with the ball and my touch.
Lofting the arc off my fingertips,
I feel my left calf turn to stone
And my ankle warp inward to form when I land
A neat right angle with my leg,
And I’m on the floor,
A pile of sweat and sick muscles.
Saying,
Hilton,
You’re 29, getting fat.
Can’t drive to your right anymore.
You can think of better things to do
On Saturday afternoons than be a chump
For a bunch of sophomore tliird-stringers;
Join the Y, steam and martinis and muscletone.
But, shit.
The shot goes in.
Ill
In Praise of BIC Pens
Others always skip over the word
That will bring the belligerents of tlie world
To the negotiating table, if only
I can get it written, or will
Teach thin kids in Woetown, West Virginia,
To rebound tough and read Ted Roethke—
Fm waiting along in a conspiracy
Of birds and sun and pom-pom girls
Lines to cheer old ladies with shopping bags
Waiting by their busstops at 5PM
Or lines to get the 12-year-olds off cigarettes
Or save the suicides in gay-bar mensrooms
Or save the fat man from his refrigerator
Or the brilliant boy from color TV
Or the RA private from re-upping for six
Or the whole Midwest from wanting to conquer Asia and
the Moon
Or the current president from his place in history—
Oh, if only I can get it written
112
DAVID HILTON
No one will bum Idttens or slap little boys or make little girls
cry
Or cower at cancer or coronaries or plain palsied old age
Or get goofy from radiation in his cornflake milk—
If only I can get it vaitten. But always
W^en I get close to the word and the crowd begins to roar
The common pen slaps, leaves the page blank—
But you, BIG pen, at nineteen cents, could trace truce terms
on tank treads.
Could ratify in the most flourishing script
The amnesty of love for our most dreaded enemies:
The u^y, the poor, the stupid, the sexually screwed-up—
Etching their releases across the slippery communiques of
generals and governors.
For Behold you can write upon butter. Yea inscribe even
through slimel
But at nineteen cents no one pays attention
To the deadwood you shatter or the manifestoes you slice in
the ice—
For who would believe Tmth at that price.
113
DAVID HILTOir
Getting Sh<yrt
His day closes like a dry month.
Next day the ropes are frayed
as nsnal but the sundial proves hi's innocence.
Generals play jumprope I'n the riverbed.
The garbageman approaches vdth the leash.
Tlicy vdll release him v/ben it rains.
Section the grapefruit into shrapnel,
gaxe upon it. Time is anything longer than short.
7’hey have draped shin over the targets.
He is forced to shov/er v/hile the armada sinks.
Imagine eavesdropping
on thebirthpangs of one’s ov/n first breath.
His eyes v/ait like shrivelled propellers.
And he hears them, tunnelling.
77ic green horse v/ill v/ait in the park for a century-
JH
DAVID HILTON
Just for him she's growing a mustache of bullets.
“Do not anticipate . . ”
But he longs for this homecoming—
his pajama bottoms folded like eagle wings,
the evenings heavy with apples and full canteens,
the memorial pillars crumbling under tlie pressure
Every morning the girl
brings him the news: schoolbuses not
plunging into gorges,
a man who has lived his whole life
and is still alive.
of the dead.
115
DAVID HILTON
The Newly^veds' Accident
In the accident
some shoes without toes
farther on stretchsocks
and toes and
beneath the major portion of his torso
a suitcase full of stew
his rvife. Crowds
of cameras
disperse with mementos
and ladies aids hastily
collaborate on a donut drive
as sirens consume
man and rvife
beyond the diagram of grief
now dissolved to fin
and the orphanage's outing
at the cinema
is done.
116
DAVID HILTON
And now bedraggled angels
tumble out of trees
this sight to see and
gawking skjwriters go
crashing into schoolyards without bailing out
as two bodies
form finally
tlirougli the mercy of motors
a genuine
union. Oh! on this green earth of love
accidents everjTvhere even
on TV midnite-movie doctors
ecstatic to doom us alive to
oxygen tents and go
and confer
but these fused two
escaped for their drive.
117
DAVID HILTON
Childhood Ambition
He is a timid man
And for free
Will allow you to look
Into his baldspot.
But he wll say
"Trees”
Timidly
And pat his puppy's head
To pulp before
Tlie thing can bark.
"Trees” he'll insist
His dome growing gnarled.
And the delicate designations tliat gleam there
Will collapse like a column
Of solemn commitments.
“Cigarette” he'll purr
“Time for some smoke”
And he'll whistle a tune about hair.
The lights of great cities will dim and flicker.
118
DAVID HILTON
Then you may cross.
Hatchets
Will appear in both hands.
Eunuch-like
The forest wall slaver to serve you.
You will rock on the spines of your enemies
Peaceful
As a puppy
And you will not want
To leave
Alive.
119
DAVID HILTON
Zoo, MHth Lamp and Chairs
The last of them escapes
to the joy that scratches at windows.
In a bottom drawer
other weapons . . . wngs and scales sinldng
tlirough the ancient resen'oirs of smoke.
And language exits, a warm trickle
as when someone whispers Pain in a deaf child’s playroom
Tire black
panther’s sobbing
leaks down again
from the ceiling crack . . . and the steady
“Boom-k’boom” of amorous camels.
The paper child is plajdng with candles.
Inside the darkened fistula
it is story-time— a promise
of windows tightening
with cold:
When the moths return vnth mouthfuls
of the sun, the sky will reveal
its animals.
120
DAVID HILTON
Sunday Again
We stopped by the seashore
to read Roethlce, running
to the water through
our cigarette ad.
For Love’s sake I find you
a pretty shell,
and we walk barefoot as birds
while I do my reading to the three grimy gulls
attacking the last of your potato salad.
Look at me, it’s our Sunday again,
and his words
are only his head
whitening now
in his dark time, a bowl for deep roots.
But God Bless the Bonel
Ah, fond widgeon—
once, done with reading,
I drove you moaning
near the pain of bone.
And ever since I sleep
married to those moans.
QUICKLY AGING HERE
as the same waves fall,
the same birds scatter
with trophies of trash
and the same rocks shatter
ten-thousand miles of water
and the familiar decay is bom on the beach,
while I slap sand from your feet,
gently, reading . . .
And always down the beach, just below the cliflfs,
where the huge arch breaks from the rock-line,
that small movement seems now
the beating of birds driven low to the sand,
now a whole family of dead
children running
to greet us.
122
DAVID HILTON
Hang On
When the sun whitens
Breathing is just another transparency
And duchs
Find their lake
Thiekening
Too late too north
This Novemher
Turning black
As you please at 6 o’clock.
Think filthy thoughts instead: think
Of Jesus
Masturbating in the desert.
On the way home each night
You see the ducks
Plunge slowly, they shake
With lethargy. But save it.
Hang on. Listen
At 6
You clothe yourself in muscles
And exhale prayers.
123
onr.aonY onn
J Will Give You Cl Pwime
i will f'lVc yon ?i pinpose.
Cnny j'l wifli you
Vthi nn nrnb)cll:i.
Jf will jirolocl yon.
'Jl'ha I’tiiii fijnifl on nil of iir.
m
GREGORY ORR
Marina
A beerbottle armada bobs in die rainbow
oil slides by the calm mouth of the marina.
Cabin cruisers bumping against die wharf,
so many dead whales to be raped now roped
to the whaleship’s side so they don’t sink.
Drink in hand, laughing, her sprayed
beehive hairdo jerking spasmodically
as though prodded with sticks,
my mother’s head appears and vanishes in
the round porthole of my vision.
I crouch on the dock holding a halo
to her face, seeing if it fits.
She disappears for the third time, and
my legs are stiff from the awkward position.
I walk to the end of the wharf where
a cruiser chugs out of the harbor's shelter,
wallows in the trough of the first waves
like a drunk stumbling into the storm.
125
GREGORY ORR
Waking up in the Woods
Jesusl she’s thin. She squirms in her sleep
like a white worm crawled halfway
out of the sleeping bag.
I light a cigarette, moving away
under the trees to watch
the cyanide dawn creep through the leaves.
At my feet a praying mantis weeps
as it devours a honey bee,
tearing apart each armor band
of its golden abdomen.
126
GREGORY ORR
A Single Candle as the Presence of God
—for Rona
We are the one for which all light
is shed, we are the coming together,
the estranged and divided returned to their source;
we are the single moment for which the candle
sheds its blood in silent ecstasy.
127
GREGORY ORE
Things You Left Behind
I
Your v/hite raincoat hangs
against my v/all like a barnacle.
I tried prying it off VrOth a crov/bar;
No use.
I tore up half the v/all
around it, but
its hard white roots had
already grov/n into tlic masonry.
I gave up.
I began watering it instead.
One morning there were tv/o
tiny mushrooms on the collar,
thougli they were gone the next day.
128
GREGORY ORR
II
A brolcen string of beads
behind tlie dresser.
You put them there,
commandos on a mission,
■^here they might roll out
at night and stepping
on them I would
crack my skull on the
carefully placed end table.
It is some consolation
to know you were tliinking of me.
Ill
There is, if I cared to sort it,
something of yours in the garbage.
For instance, that grapefruit rind:
You car\'ed it with your own hands,
hollowed it out,
squeezed it
for the last of tire juice.
GREGOEY ORR
Dead Wasp
Your abdomen still twitches, probing the air.
Slie says if you fly into the house I must kill you,
v/hich makes sense. But when I have
swatted you, she screams and takes your reflex
throbbing for suffering. What can I do?
There is no v/ay to act rightly.
130
GREGORY ORR
Being and Wind
Another day when being
alive is its omi reward;
The wind defines me:
hair in my face
tlie open places
between buttons.
I am its absence
stepping through space.
MARY ELLEN SOLT
The Visitor
First he rushed over to a
large chair
lifted its tail and
kissed the ass of the
cat, sleeping
Then we had lunch
You eat like a pig
my daughter said
I love v-ape juice
he replied
Then they played house
But I want it. No
it's mine. She
cried. He kicked the
cardboard walls down
What shall we play now
I won't play witli you
You break my toys
Why did you invite me then
You're a coo-coo head ‘
132
MARY ELLElS SOLi
two*
me
Itn-es
itsuua.
AnisHiser.t
133
MARY ELLEN SOLT
'Wind,lntn{ies,LifdngDayf
Cantahilejcantabile,
134
MARY ELLEN SOLT
MARY ELLEN SOLT
o C C Z 3 3
•" <, ’''i/ ( 4 >
136
WILLIAM HATHAWAY
Conspiracy in loiw
There are some very ghastly faces
pressed against my windows
these nights and something
big has been in the potatoes.
Have you ever been to Lone Tree?
Where a bloody man sells
geese and leaves their heads
by his pump til they’re skulls?
There is a man in Iowa who keeps
Pancho Villa’s skull in a leather
trunk with mementos from Japan,
QUICKLY AGING HERE
a small portrait of his mother.
Out here where a dog’s tongue sticks
to his own frozen water, catfish
winter sullenly under the ice,
moving their tails in long, slow thrashes.
Where faces watch my wife undress
and there is nothing in my mailbox
but letters with windows, or a ladybug,
or an ad for Faim/Sport Thermal Sox.
And if you’ve ever been to Tipton
you know they don’t have parking meters,
but four saloons, a courthouse, tliree
variety stores, a hippie and a movie theatre.
And I tell 5'ou there’s trouble
light here in Iowa City when a boy
would stand the cold, far from
parental love, T.V., to see us enjoy
one legal pleasure in this wretched land.
138
WILLIAM HATHAWAY
Rod Slemmons’ Dream
Here is a place you’ve never been,
where a sea wind shifts the dunes
eternally, rocks refuse to weather.
These halls can be narrow but a turn
will bring you to a ballroom
or a cocktail party with old friends.
Sometimes you walk on scarred
linoleum, fishnets fall out of a warped
closet but dust won’t ever rise here.
There are one hundred boarded rooms
and one where sunlight falls.
QUICKLY AGING HERE
but doesn't fall.
You think: “This must have been a pantry
and over tliere they kept the iee.”
but then you see your sisters,
still little girls playing parchesi
on the window seat.
You’re twisting a knob to a door
you have to open. Something
painfully boring is chasing you,
but the damn thing is stuck at the top.
Losing interest you start juicing
lemons, pressing down and twisting.
Why are you squeezing lemons?
There is no water, no sugar, or a glass.
A naked girl sucks your earlobe
and you get an erection.
You touch her softly, with love
and she becomes a little girl, twisting
indiflFerently away from you.
So you go to the sail-loft where
it is as silent as the world of the deaf
and the air is always fresh but still.
Two men are stitching a sail
and you know you shouldn’t
but the polished oak and colored numbers
are irresistible so you step into the room.
HO
WILLIAM HATHAWAY
Attic
Failing in business, grandfather
did not go West or drink, for
the depression was an act of God.
His wfe, children, Herbert Hoover
were forgiven, wctims of his mercy.
Twenty more years he sat in this
uncomfortable chair charming old
ladies in Kalamazoo witli his
gallantry and Latin phrases.
Here we are when mother was pretty,
grinning some great family joke.
A minister from Peoria, college
professors, shrews and midwives
clustered in fumbling intimacy.
The uncle who was electrocuted one
Christmas by his treelights steadies
my sister on a nameless dog.
Vulnerable and out of focus
QUICKLY AGING HERE
we patiently smile, forever.
I hear faintly the excitement
of my children misbehaving below.
The old men buried grandfather
in Benton Harbor but here he is
among confirmation papers, diaries,
invoices and unfinished things.
Crouching to the pane I watch
my daughter waddle through my
garden covered with petals and green.
142
WILLIAM HATHAWAY
When Beulah Did the HuTa in Missoula
Snow in August, and people
talking about it all the way
up to the cheap hotel which
wasn’t cheap and smelled like
popcorn, gas leaked somewhere.
Nothing moves that mountain
but weather and earthworms.
Signs say pack a shovel, pail,
axe, beware of grizzly bears.
If s a long way from Raspail.
A bad place to camp, much less
mate, where game are counted,
tagged, and Indians stay drunk.
At Chenonceaux the river doesn’t
143
run but history is son et lumike.
When fires come they grab men
ofiE the streets, mills close,
Smokey waves from the bank.
An Indian tosses coals to forest
muttering bum, you mother, bum.
Where Racine is not Wisconsin
there are cuckolds and baroque
ladies leaning on their pillars.
Now, held behind the gills,
my bug-eyed trout mouths,
help. I’m starving, oh God.
144
WIlrlvlAm n JV JL »r *
A Hermit Advises a Monk 'When Things Are
Bleak Indeed
Soon the wind ■«t 11 be gentle
in the morning, but I don’t know
if you will still be alive to
celebrate Spring like last year
with Spagbetti and wine.
Let’s click heels and do£F hats
one last time to the good ladies;
drink beer and pick off ticks
while the canyon breeze is warm
and our talk is to each other.
The five-stone drug has dried
your skin; you’re half here
and the rest is hunting them.
Somebody is lost under the stars
and the green chain takes a break.
All those berries are poisonous,
that bright pool is alkaline.
Come back you fraction-man,
the Indians are drank. That bear
145
the/re skinning looks like a man.
Here’s my shanty with old tires
out front to sit on, meat-loaf
in the oven, a mountain to stare at.
A man could drink with his pigs
or have a quiet joint if he wished.
How clean the wind is tonight.
It comes off the western coast
and after all this way the sea
is in the mountains bringing memories.
Will you enjoy some wine and music now?
The Crazy Lady
The Dirty Man makes an obscene invitation
to the Crazy Lady in the Italian courtyard
of the BPL. Korea she yells, Korea.
That's all you think of. Korea she whispers.
She is very crazy, the crazy lady.
Dmnks moan in their sleep when the sun
slips them into the shade. The splashing
fountain makes them wet their pants.
Such a peaceful place to sit in the summer,
clean gravel paths and little orange trees.
The Crazy Lady confers with her la\vyers.
She bawls them all out, dismisses a few,
then she pleads, weeps and they come back.
She is suing all of us: me, the dmnks,
QUICKLY AGING HERE
the library guard, the Cuban who fixes
the fountain, even the children and birds.
The Dirty Man pulls at his jug and leers.
He moves with the sun closer to her
dark comer. He shows us what he wants.
His fly is open; he is very dirty, the Dirty Man.
Oh, but there is no cause for alarm.
Every day this happens, see, th^ are lovers.
They hold hands and talk quietly so as
not to disturb. Soon they will go
to the Commons, by the wading pool,
feed squirrels, talk of what the/ll
do v/hen she gets all that money.
148
WILLIAM HATHAWAY
Card Burning in Central Bark
I open my family magazine, pretty
girls, whiskey bottles and then you.
I show my wife. She says you’re a troll,
your teeth look crooked and why do I
run around with fuck-ups like you anyway?
Some questions don’t expect answers.
Mountains and bad weather have done
something for me, I feel my Wheaties.
They’re crunchy and the morning paper
clues me in on Ed Slocum’s lost cows.
Last night a canyon wnd blew over
gas war signs, drove magpies into town.
I know you’re unfit for service,
even the cops won’t beat you publicly,
but old-timers can pick out desperadoes.
Out there in the sheep meadow with
Mad Dog Anderson, your eyes like Saturday
night you cup the flame to a cheroot.
WILLIAM HATHAWAY
Trumansburg Fair
In her little tent Honey Bumps
lumbered out of sequin Enery,
cymbals banging each victory.
We stood, tanned and drunk
in the dark pit, feebng handsome.
A loudspeaker announced cattle.
That lady’s rubber dummy had
a wink, a leer, a cocked hat
and a name I’ve since forgotten.
That man boards my bus at
nigjit, thumbs my magazine,
is only cigar smoke at dawn.
We fingered our girls in the
House of Fun, weird laughter
and blackness made us private.
The firemen’s beer made us dizzy
in the sun while farmers with
beasts trampled ehaos everywhere.
Our world swung wide
on the comers as we slept;
only stars hung over
the lake and pastureland.
We woke heavy-headed before
the city, holding our rumpled girls.
150
STEPHEN SHRADER
The Campaign: Letters from the Front
A FOREWOIUD
Just short of the isthmus, the court
phrenologist, puzzling the import
of the serven lost adjectives
in the Book of Skulls,
brought the columns up short
signaled the lighting of torches,
high noon though it was,
and retired to his cart
not to be seen again for several weeks.
FIRST TETTER
it is a strange land, sister
and while the knitted banner, tribute
to your craft, hangs from my cuff bringing
no small measure of reassurance
I am less and less your brother for every hair
that’s added to my beard
though votives to the optic nen'e
and visual purple have been prescribed
astigmatism runs its course through our camp. Mother
it will not be long now
151
QUICKLY AGING HERE
my arms have grown wrinlcled
and my forehead— well, expect the worst
and sister, wed Stefan
if you must, though I fear his days of sight
are numbered, lensmaker or no.
It is a strange land
to be sure, and the yellow eye hangs always
just below the next rise. We measure the distance
to the straits by the grain’s height and
if we do not sight water by harvest, this campaign
like all the others shall end I fear
in white-blindness and brain-frost. Father
rest his eyes, would remember well
SECOND LETTER
Muriel, wife
I have coupled with the enemy and my parts
are no more. Pray that what is in your womb
is male, for Nortus
fretting also as his curls go limp
has called upon his first bom
these ditches and pits, wife
how may I explain them
painlessly shallow
the mud on their sides like mucus.
152
STEPHEN SHRADER
So many
have fallen, turned on their hacks lilce turtles.
First the erection, then death
and Muriel, at last
my brother’s anklet has been found, a spike
driven through it, fixed to a wooden curb
hardly noticed for the yellow moss upon it
I cannot bring myself to dream
and must devote the Moment of Cycles to fantasy
and the small seasons to your memory
and did the flesh on the neck
of Jan’s commander part and run, driving
the counsel from his tents?
Did his cormnander eat his own droppings
and demand that the games of his childhood
be played at sunrise? I have lost my footprints
in this fearful country
home of my brother’s bones
QUICKLY AGING HERE
THIRD LETTER
Uncle William, your nightmares
stir me. The graph, tlie arch and the fifth comer
are only blotted pages in my ledger. Here
the leaves die on the trees
the red chevron on my sleeve
has brought some measure of respect, little
though that matters to me, and
as Foreman of the Grove, I am served last
and most generously
we know nothing of the winter here
and all pipes are laid aside at the mention
of brown in its less subtle shades.
Uncle
I am nourished only by your gothic spices and
the wagon, when full, lacks anything, I say
your herbs. Uncle, and the glow
of pipes around a dead cook fire
and the night shot full of holes
and the day running on
You, Godfather
do you keep your cave tidy and free of smoke?
154
STEPHEN SHRADER
I spit on youl We have secured your island for you
the sky is pulled tight and knotted
the ocean stagnant, the fog weaving in
then the clouds that roll in my ears
and the smoke that chuckles and scratches
through my brain, cramping my eyelids
William, can you see to my affairs.
Peter, your questions escape me.
Carlo, you came out here half dead
and I am only doing you a favor
FOURTH XETTER
I am addressing your ribs now, Adele
as I see no other wsy to keep you whole.
I resist complaint, for the boats heave off
only when a perfect silence is achieved. And
only prow-foam \sdll flesh you out again.
SEND PICTURES OF THE CHILDREN. Are there five
now or seven as before
orphans have stolen my mattress
but I can hardly begrudge them this small comfort.
Marguerite, your husband's orderly
informs me of the youngest's iUness.
SEND PICTURES OF THE CHILDREN.
15
QUICKLY AGING HERE
Does Karl still sleep through dinner and appear beforehand
with his trousers unlaced. Such a clever child
Adele, I lost your good-humor
on the quartermaster's barge, and it is ribs now
every night. Does tliis flatter you?
Are the children aware of Uncle Niles?
They must be old enough to understand
no word from our son at the front.
SEND PICTURES OF THE CHILDREN. The lower keys
have disappeared and the leather ones are hardly adequate
no words can express it. I must risk
an indelicacy. Your breasts. Marguerite
shall be clamped about my nights and your groin
shall be the smallest unit in the distribution of glass.
Have I made myself clear?
SEND PICTURES OF THE CHILDREN
our orders say only to be on board
according to rank and sorrow.
This is the big one. Operation Spendthrift.
Another beach and another form letter
announcing our son’s misuse
156
STEPHEN SHRADER
FIFTH LETTER
Son, do not waste your fifty coins through
indecision. Your mother joins me in beseeching you
(Testing— Testing) do not lift a skirt without good reason
and let not the reason be one you hold in your hand
very soon I shall give birth.
At an inappropriate moment. In battle perhaps, my ear
to the si^t, my buttocks filling the plastic saddle.
The adjutant went into labor this morning
attended only by the kitchen help who welcomed
the break in routine
(Testing— Testing) Wallace
your constant attentions annoy me. These trees
should be free of obstacles and this role you play
unauthorized next of kin
is a perfect approximation of a grossly subtle rhythm
but dearest son
visibility is not merely a matter of simple cleanliness.
An senses shall be employed.
15
If only they were pot roasts (Testing— Testing)
or static, in layers, near an unavailable horizon
these instruments lack sophistication.
Childbirth should not be undertaken by amateurs. Wallace
you must force my hand. This child needs a father and
all in all und so weiter though I do not think tliis dust
could have driven us to it. Son, son, son, (Testing-
Testing) Son I cannot explain
how messy we all become witli our equipment.
Nothing is unreasonable if you eat it.
It’s all a matter of fashion anyway.
If we finally meet them next fall, I shall
definitely consider raising my hemline
SIXTH LETTER
Sister Vivian, after a year
all we can remember is that we came by water.
My mattress has tides. Too many shapes come
then go under the influence of an unnatural moon
Walter brings ointments
but his nails are dirty. Clara lives for fresh linen.
Natalie, sleeping in flurries, dreaming pink
lives for a needle. I do what I can
Monsignor, I regret to say tliat
your subsidies are useless. Nothing is certain
till we weigh it with our hands. I remember how
my habit billowed on tlie bell rope. I never guessed
STEPHEN SHRADER
I’d find myself trapped inside a nightgown
wth a lizard up my veins
Mother, there are things
I should have told you when you were younger.
About the darkness in the sleeves of an amputee
the fox-fire around a hemorrhage
sewing up a sack of flesh
Sister Ursula, a prayer is a gunshot
and though I enjoy them after a fashion, tlie boys sing
in their own contractions and pay me with beef
Mother Superior, the lawyer
you will many' gave me a child, and the child
gave me a basket of pain.
In such a country
the clouds fall of their own weight and tlie wind
sits like dirty water in a sink. Still
though our bowels are numb and trembling
we wait for moonrise and a rush of surf
POSTSCRIPT
Brother, this fist
tliis unnatural flower blooming in my sleeve
Mother, this razor of nausea
this tightrope cancer and treaty of germs
QUICKLY AGING HERE
We’ve fallen in love with a fractured bone.
Father, this convocation
of wounds, this recruitment of calluses and claws
Sister, this final frame
this metal lover with a beam in her eye
We've fallen in love with a hole in the ground.
The Front shuffles into our kitchen.
We set the table with nightmares.
This is the meal we’ve been waiting for.
160
RAYMOND DIPALMA & STEPHEN SHRADER
The Busted Lute: a Baedeker
These droll slices of spring like a novel similar
To our first impressions oS the boat: Antwerp, city
of diminishment
A challenge to our finding Library or lodging—
this diminishment.
This pale attic inverted in a degenerate season, a sea
Of illogical Europeans & the echoes of old friends’ comments
on the weather.
Small talk like a tumbler. Brief visitations from a
soothing grief . . . !
Why do I come back, when the mirror tells me more
than age.
When my hope is more than axiomatic, a reflection
lacking balance.
I giggle to myself— a way to forget
Those cities in the hands of troublesome women,
Antwerp, a pleasurable
Similarity in her women to my lost sister
part Flemish herself.
We pose as burghers finding the feel of it not unfamiliar:
I know my mj^terious home is old as well;
I no longer fear its riddle, my calm is jelly-like, inert.
161
RAYMOND DIPADMA & STEPHEN SHRADER
The Andalusian Lute: Another Baedeker
In Granada baths are de rigeur; therefore the freighters
Present their weary passengers witli a bar of soap upon
Discharge of certain fluids. The florists are ill-mannered
Flicking their wrists at more than mosca-flies, as
my editor warned.
How did I land this assignment? “One lip b'sses the other^
Conchita was fond of saying as she thumbed thru my notes
unnerving my
Extremities. But this is an unfair comparison.
Granada fingers
My memory of that sour-dugged priestess of swing but I must
Dance! Lord knows, all else is fabulation
(with a bow to my mentor) at least here I am or
here lam. . .
Granada is famous for its epistemologists. If nothing else
And that latter is all that's here with a technique all its own.
This is why the articles requested are not forthcoming.
Dear sir.
The fluid stains; Conchita’s long dead; and I'm up for
that bath.
162
Haiku
The pine trees explode
the birds at dawn and cradle
their exclamations
Our house stores sunlight
in baslcets and sets it out
for the evening fire
The small drunk turtle
challenges the morning wind
to race to the pond
LUKE
Some Few, Some Very Few
some few, some very few, possess death
when it comes and hold onto it—
a daguerreot3'pe displayed
next to their bed it becomes
a conversation piece referred to
as cahnly as an ivory cameo bought
somewhere in Switzerland.
this old woman—
the link for me to quantrill’s raiders and
strawberries stolen the summer of 1889 and
hunger kept
on dusty shelves—
this old woman
took death into her body years ago
with quiet hospitality she understood
its need and could not refuse
though this new expense would
exhaust her small resources.
164
LUKE
she was once a large woman
a matriarch whose authority grew complete
as she buried two sisters four brotlrers
mother fatlier six of her children
husband, turned to the business
of her own funeral she has made
one last count of her household goods:
examined the souls of each
of her survivors: inventoried
her life's decisions: now she waits
while sewing a dress
from the remnant memories
of ninety years she says death
is cold to her: she does not like it
165
LUKE
Some Few, Some Very Few
some few, some very few, possess death
when it comes and hold onto it—
a daguerreotype displayed
next to their bed it becomes
a conversation piece referred to
as calmly as an ivory cameo bought
somewhere in Switzerland.
this old woman-
the link for me to quantrill’s raiders and
strawberries stolen the summer of 1889 and
hunger kept
on dusty shelves—
this old woman
took death into her body years ago
with quiet hospitality she understood
its need and could not refuse
though this new expense would
exhaust her small resources.
164
LUKE
Upon which to rejoice
A slight stirring darkness
ordered us to hesitate.
Somehow we had found it.
The hard earth was matted with brittle hay;
the soaked-in acid smell of animals
stifled us in the first instants;
rough branches of juniper
scratched against the mud walls.
The night was cadenced
with the warm, heavy breathing
of a woman who has bom a son
and, resting from her labor.
LUKE
evening news: st. louis
willard wirtz, secretary of labor,
supports humphrey the news says
over in central Illinois
the big muddy was reported
to crest safely under flood level
because of recent heavy rains
snow flurries with slight precipitation
were predicted for st. louis
Johnson received an ovation
in st. Patrick's cathedral
a late bulletin announced
that martin 1. king was shot
to death toni^t on a balcony
in memphis
there were 3,238 vietcong
killed last month by allied forces
mrs. mabel buraham won $630
in the kxok caster egg contest
the pope still declines to make a statement
on birth control
4 april 1968
166
LUKE
Upon which to rejoice
A slight stirring darkness
ordered us to hesitate.
Somehow we had found it.
The hard earth was matted with brittle hay;
the soaked-in acid smell of animals
stifled us in the first instants;
rough branches of juniper
scratched against the mud walls.
The night was cadenced
with the warm, heavy breathing
of a woman who has bom a son
and, resting from her labor.
QUICKLY AGING HERE
looks upon her child.
We had not surprised them
or disturbed their night.
Unmistakably
they had expected us and we,
in turn, had sensed they would be there.
No one spoke,
which made the stillness reverence;
while provision for her comfort
became our awk\vard male concern;
adding to the fire, another cloak,
tethering animals. He took
our embarrassment with gentle
eyes and helped us do again
what he had done before we came.
But we had nothing else to give
and our silence was inadequate,
though none of us knew why.
168
SUSAN AXELKOD
The Home
I
They walk dangerously
close tonight . . .
Those mad little girls
I can hear their voices going
The cat, sunk in his basket
never reeked
ndth quite such sour fury
And the program—
that wall-eyed twig
of a momma
Miss Klister
dead on arrival
from Munich
What possible hfe
did she think she could glean
from
a Peter-Pan Bra
Clairol
and the dry-heaves
at midnight
We were her specialty
delusions of poesy
and the like
a delicacy among the street inclined
169
QUICKLY AGING HERE
and the asylum babies.
And hov/ fine it was
to be not quite
really crazy
among all those
stately and profound insanities.
To be taken so seriously.
Can you remember
Claudia, edging into oblivion
sideways
wth bulging eyes
Watching it
just below her right shoulder
slip up like the tide-
talking all the way down.
Was it she
to whom
you gave Vaseline
with instructions
for Yusef
“that Arab”
She sat shiva
later
set fire to her room
mourning Claudia
who had somehow
got unstuck
170
STTSAN AXELROD
And Karen
big bosomed and foul
puffed-up bice an adder
threatening imminent explosion.
With hvo bright
discs of ire
she would hold you
secreting fluids all
the while
suffusing the room
wth a hea^y
aromatic damp
Red curls boiling
over a brow
flawless
lucent
those perfect features
untouched
I remember the bite
of her nails
her thumb particularly
along the cheek
up to the eyes.
QUICKLY AGING HERE
II
In that room we shared
you slept
badly
your bed
in tight formafa'on
right angled to the wall
3'Ou took things as you found them
Mine-
askew but slightly
Tliat room;
oceanic,
we dove and surfaced,
as was officially encouraged—
the great mirror
a vague and
occasional shore.
All about
into tlie night
the ceaseless cry and cackle
of the sea-fowl
hunting
there was never quiet
in our wallowing
world
172
STJSAN AXELROD
"Who gave them first—
the land flovers
ferns and dogwood
establishing a precedent
we looked at each other
wth startled eyes
and could not name it.
Say it now then
now that tire danger is over
Speak of the resin and the burning pine
die rich and heady smoke
rising
to shivering lips
We bore our love
like some strange
transplanted organ
shameful,
necessary—
Gills
to survive
immersion
in that deep
wet world.
173
SUSAN AXELROD
Chameleon
Wliat of this loving
that we do is it to or with
one another
Here
in this narrow
soft hollow.
We are both
swamp creatures
cold-blooded
and green
in the grass
and thicket.
Grey under
the pond stones
We blend
succumb
and are reconciled.
174
SUSAN AXELROD
Unfurling
Our pronged tongues.
Saluting the fly
before encompassing him.
Flight is nothing to us
nor the seasons.
We shall lie still
together
in the mud
our twin pulses
beating
till the bright hawk
dives.
175
SUSAN AXELROD
Snips and Snails
I
This scored tissue
of rain
divides my sight;
reserving half ray vision for itself,
\vithholding it
from the far side
of the street.
Once one
had plaited
a flowng sheet
of clear plastic
into a short rope,
and fixed it
by a thiclc
brutal knot
to the parched railing
of the fire escape
And there it hangs three, five years since
^railing rain
from its soiled lacy
ends.
176
SUSAN AXELROD
And another said
"Clitorises
are getting
longer,
you know”
It was his choice
to have her
pass nightly
below his window
naked,
her pink clit
swinging freely
like the clapper
of a great bell.
And he would fall
to her
as loosely
as an unbuttoned shirt—
and enter
and curl within,
tighter than a pearl:
Where do we
get the bits and pieces
to fill our secret bag?
177
QUICKLY AGING HERE
Chewing gum
tobacco
clots of dust
and a soft pear
lint
and ink
stained tissues
spewed out about her
as Miranda
fell backwards
in the
lurching
subway car.
Out of control
we seek only to be diminished—
Thinking to
lose our hapless strength
through the stratagem of despair.
As if that would close
the unsleeping eye.
II
Charles Lloyd,
you are among the heroes
of this season
of fevers,
and Keith Jarrett as well—
178
SUSAN AXELROD
You pluck the cherrj'
You mouth the cherry.
You spit the cherry forth:
the highest
ripest fruit.
pit and skin
and
tasty meat.
You know
that shame and terror
lie with pleasure
in a pocket between the belly and the spine
And yet
that from that place alone
the fire-flowers grow:
Threading needle like
filaments of blue
into the rank tangle
of the larger roots;
bearing down,
suckling
our tenderness.
I am so near
I can hear the petals
tremble-
splayed on the forest floor;
two unmatched
scintillating
lips of hght.
179
STUART PETERFREUND
American Poetry
—with apologies to Saleh and Simpson—
Can it roast a duck?
Can it have a baby?
Can it do an adagio dance?
And will it dance
With grease on its mouth?
And blood on the darkest part
Of its inner thighs?
180
STUAKT PETERFREUND
Miller
And that was tlie hottest summer
I ever knew in the village;
All day, drinking my
Sweaty beer, wearing my
Literary undershirt, the one
With the holes in it.
Writing the novel to end all
Novels . . .
With your hat and shoes and
Bag, with your fingernails
And tease-me mouth, wearing
No underwear, you came
Every night without being called.
Without knocking.
To proofread the new pages.
QUICKLY AGING HEKE
To check me for errors.
This is a message from California,
Where the traffic grows more absurd,
\Vhere I am failing in my
Belief in accidents.
This is addressed to all tlie hollows
Your body no longer has.
And w'hat it says is that
We all must eat something—
It is the giant’s decree.
I am therefore sitting down
To dinner,
\^ffiich will be a glass of blue, cold
Water
And your sweet , blind eyes.
182
STUART PETERFREUND
'Who Is the Ratman?
—After a seven teentli-century Dutch etdiing—
To dream of rats in childhood,
Nibbling your eyes like frosty
Blue grapes;
To dream of tire white wine
Those grapes could make;
To become a wne drinker,
Going home, following
The line between the
Cobblestones . . .
My dirty hands rub my eyes.
My head hurts:
No one to make it better.
Who is the ratman?
Who is the rat man?
Call the rat catcher
With his dog and smoke
And trained rats.
When he is done,
Share wine with him.
183
STUART PETERFREUND
Percussion, Salt and Honey
I
I sit drinking wine,
Talking to a traveller
With no memories.
Down in the street
Is a man falling down.
I have been watching him
All afternoon.
Sometimes Nancy shakes me
Into the morning. I am a
Traveller with no memories
About shaking to sleep.
Or do I go smoothly
With my wine, striped sails
On the red sea?
II
One wnter, in a
Survival suit, I went
To sleep in the snow
In the meadowland above
Taughannock.
STUART PETERFREUND
And as the stars gave ^^’ay,
I wohe up,
Thinking I felt the
Ground move. But when I got
Up from the drift blown
Around me, there was one smooth
Impression of my body.
The snow I melted
For a morning meal tasted
Sweet, the taste of blood
Or of another mouth.
Ill
And that summer.
When I saw myself in my
Sweat one day, unloading
Crates in Chicago;
And that summer.
Lying in the furnace with you
To remind me of the ashes,
I think I learned the talent:
The sound of a beehive on the ocean
The sound of a spice drum.
THOMAS HANNA
I Make Fallout Too
Today the Nvind is from the south:
a thousand magi enter the Saarland
as if to blast open the apse of the northern shy.
They are senators-designate,
my missionaries,
sent to lead the Celts and Goths
into some hot weatlier ideas about flesh.
You, Maria, are repentant: all your slits
ache
from being open so long,— your eyes,
your various inventive mouths
have tasted enough reality:
The countries of the east
are tired of the shifting crust of earth
under their feet, the perilous politics
of our west.
Maria, we wiU pet and fuck the day away,
until,
tossed in &e air by some black beast,
we must await Omar Khayyam,
the high priest,
my tax examiner,
who will break our fall with his
long arm of words.
186
THOMAS HANNA
The Leader
—For Da\dd Ray
That the green angel of nature
might weep at his feet,
he would twist and torture
the air into mushrooms and
then he seen in heaven.
And he will not stand it to be
otherwise. And it galls him
that for hilling
he must trust to others:
the stars are too small for his anger.
He would catch us each
by his own finger,
wherever we are,
in huts or pockets of green.
THOMAS HANNA
Vietnam Turnpike
The disastrous condition:
the organdy road,
Sparkle Plenty in conference
with Senator Morse,
me riding
down the New York Thruway
wife and child bunked
in the back seat
in tlie new wealth
of my Dodge Dart.
A vortex crawling up
from the side of the road,
the unseen hitchhiker:
a friend: a fish-tail
setting up, lifting up
the rear end of the car,
moving it back and forth,
casually.
A condition, an organdy road,
a certain confident step. . . .
Sparkle Plenty comes,
silver-maned, witch-jawed
to witness the wreck.
Sen. Morse calls attention
to it, Jeane Dixon tells me
about it before it happens.
THOMAS HANNA
My cliild, wfe, dolls floating
inside the cabin.
National Safety Council cameras
hold the thing
in slow motion for my eyes.
They float past me,
Raggedy Ann- and Raggedy Andy-like,
and the Mndshield floats in many pieces
admitting tlrem to a diflPerent inside.
I, clumsy, slow motioned,
play foots)' with the pedals,
an organist in church.
I make a certain step.
The road is silver-maned,
“ slack-jawed,
I debate.
I debate the view of Helen:
this face could not launch a thousand ships.
I debate Troilus and Cressida.
I debate Paladin.
I debate my
brother in law the State Department.
I take blows on the head from police:
I hide my earring while they beat and beat me
I am not Van Gogh,
I wall not give them my ear
even if I do love them.
I can clear all this up
with a phone call.
I call the permanent observer
QUICKLY AGING HERE
from South Vietnam.
They tell me just who
Pham Khac Rau really is.
There is some mistake.
He is a private citizen.
He used to be the PR man
for the Saigon Government.
“Friend” I call-
“Do not leave me in the street!
“I, too, am a private citizen!
“I swear we are alone!
'Xet me in!
“Don’t leave me bleeding in the street!
“My car broke down, believe me!
“Open up!
“I’ll tell you about it,
“about Raggedy Ann,
“Raggedy Andy!”
190
THOMAS HANNA
The Downtown Swan Thing
My women surround me,
Isis the Swan, Lila Hopeful,
the ancient streets contain them.
The bricks,— big spenders—
shower us with a\S'ful gifts
as we w-alk look at geese/
watch the paratroopers fall/
like meteorites.
I drink tliem aU in-
bricks, girls, invadeis—
start thinking about Esta,
my only Jew,
going nuts over Johnny Cash.
I agree Mth her.
I agree with everjbody!
The Idds I taught in college
enlist,
my own bloodcells
become the ultimate deterrent.
I lean over Manhattan
to take a look at the Nanows.
The heaven tilts,
and ashes to ashes
we all fall down
wetims
to galloping horsemen/words
trapped in the craw.
THOMAS HANNA
Christmas, Ibiza, ig66
—For Ruth
I had asked you to try again
to turn on the light,
to try your luck on that faulty switch,
but you said it wasn't worth it:
if it was going on, it would have by now.
No, I said, it’s just the switch,
it has to work one time in loo anyway—
don’t you believe in anything?
You laughed and I said
I will show you tlie power of belief and in one shot
verily the light was on. It was because you
had just said that when a child closes his eyes,
all the world goes black,
and that you made me remind you of it.
192
THOMAS HANNA
The Song of Casyor Brioschi
Stand there hours, Casj'or Brioschi.
Have fun standing feeling bitter,
reminding people of a stunted lamp-post.
Your looks aren’t hot enough to light those windows
across the street. They know no pleasure.
They are strict mothers, guarding little Honey.
Don’t try to say you love poor Honey.
No one will listen to a stunted lamp-post.
You are disgusting, Casyor Brioschi,
and you are wasting everybody’s time. The day is bitter
cold. Pigeons huddle by chimneys and wndows.
Honey’s mother sits inside: “It was a pleasure,
Sir,” she glared at you. Her eyes rattled like windows.
To see you fumble your goodbyes to Honey!
The slobbering exit of Casyor Brioschi.
You found out that too much love is bitter,
like too much wine. Stand up. Lamp Post.
Be proud. Never be a slouching lamp-post.
Remember, you are a Brioschi!
You are of a race of great and bitter
men. Move your hot feet across tire tar with pleasure.
Ring the doorbell till it oozes honey.
Make the shades wink in the very windows.
193
QUICKLY AGING HERE
Ring your heels in halls until the walls are windows,
until the women whisper "he’s a man, is young Brioschi.”
Be tall and strong. No one thinks a lamp-post
^vill fall down. Give your second smile to Honey.
Save the first for her mother’s pleasure.
TeU her, "Mama, Mama, don’t be bitter.
See now? Your son is docile. Don’t be bitter.
Open up. Open your heart like windows.
Please now, give your urchin one small pleasure.
His gut is cold. It rattles for tea and honey.
Bang on it. It’s hollow as a lamp-post.
I am your little boy, Casyor Brioschi.”
That’s the way of the bitter tribe Brioschi:
leave the lamp-post, crash in through the windows:
The proverb says that bitter honey gives more pleasure.
194
BARBARA L. GREENBERG
“Boarding of Fan American Flight 2oj
Will Be Delayed Ten Minutes.”
Tliese aie an airport's bones: the pairs of lovers
opening and closing their embraces
like shellfish breathing, and tlie knots of children,
anxieties and parents at the parting
of now from ever. We consult our watches.
There are people weeping under the Pan Am sign
and at the insurance kiosk. Shall we sign
for flight insurance, we who are clock-bound lovers
of life, this life, stiU. ticking in our watches
and in our ribs, and through our hard embraces?
.Or would we crash in vain? This little parting
pinches us with omens and the diildren
have radar in tlieir minds. We are all children
leaning toward the tower for a sign,
a wink, a w'aming. Are the clouds parting?
Is the sea? Will lightning part tire lovers
and solder strangers into weird embraces?
Each eyes another. Each stranger watches
through shadowed eyes, his shadow. A skyhop watches
baggage carts. A mother counts her children.
Nuns watch each other, but a priest embraces
the host of us and grandly makes the sign
of Christendom, to wave before the lovers.
And where is the such sweet sorrow in this parting?”
195
QUICKLY AGING HEEE
a co-ed quibbles as the time of parting
is endlessly postponed and we rewind our watches.
. . will be delayed ten minutes” Yet the lovers,
self-winding in their passions, are like children
who will not mind the clock or any sign
except the metric of their own embraces.
. . will be delayed ten minutes.” These embraces
define our limbo at the edge of parting
ten minutes deathward. Under the Pan Am sign
we wave good-bye for anyone who watches
and then become each other; parents, children,
enemies and comrades in the arms of lovers.
We peep between embraces. Tlirough midnight watches,
our dry lips parting, we prepare the children
for a sign of consummation in tliese lovers.
196
BARBARA L. GREENBERG
The Gentleman! s Garden
The gentleman’s garden
is held secure
by a green electric hedge.
Not even a cat
can cheat the hedge
whose eye admits no evil.
The gentleman’s children
are dumpling good
and win not touch the hedge.
Among their mother’s
roses they play.
They pluck their mother’s roses.
Their father whispers
against their cheeks
Good-bye, His beard is bread.
His children play.
The woman they hear
beyond the green hedge, screaming
My hair is on fire,
my face is on fire,
is nothing, is no one they know.
Their father is gentle.
He would not murder
something they could not eat.
BARBARA L. GREENBERG
The Husband
He'd never wrung the
neck of a rabbit, a
goose or a sparrow, not
any until
in tlie night
with a cat
at the back of the cellar
he strangled and strangled.
But why? said his wife
with tlie chill on her nipples
and fur in her mouth
and the cat eyes staring.
Why did you bring it
why bring it to me?
And the tlrousands of cats
were the jaws of her question, they
mewed up the night from their
tliousands of fences.
He sucked at his tongue and was drunk on the juices.
198
BAKBAB.A L. GREENBERG
Wedlock
He does lemember. Back to the bloom
of ever^iiting, bis own undoing, bow
on the honeymoon bis earlobes grew
to bladders full of music she
insisted listening.
The wet white melon always on bis plate
and the waiters waiting.
How licking secrets from her sugared lips
she bathed him nightly in her breath
and bluebirds in the tiger’s mouth were singing.
Beyond the tropics. How a hand could shut
their wooden room, could lock its comers,
how the cans of fish they ate of
swam in rainbow.
And bowls of blood the soup she served
in which her eyes were floating, he
remembers and her eyes’ reproach
as manly taking up his spoon
he ate it all,
he sucked her down.
BARBARA L. GREENBERG
The Husband
He'd never wrung the
neck of a rabbit, a
goose or a sparrow, not
any until
in the night
with a cat
at the back of the cellar
he strangled and strangled.
But why? said his rvife
rvith the chill on her nipples
and fur in her mouth
and the cat eyes staring.
Why did you bring it
why bring it to me?
And the thousands of cats
were the jaws of her question, they
mewed up the night from their
thousands of fences.
He sucked at his tongue and was drunk on the juices.
198
BARBARA L. GREENBERG
In and out in the Public Gardens
swan by swimming by duck by tree
by bridge and river and flowered path
they'll dance, tlie maidens, the maiden ladies
s\veet and sweaty, the red-nosed rummies
ringing their buttocks above their thighs
like wedding bells. Come dorvn to see.
Come down to see and pack a lunch.
And nobody laugh. And nobody laugh.
201
BARBARA L. GREENBERG
The Victim
A thin wool coat was the jew of him.
Young, he saw it hanging in the attic;
left it hanging, sleeping in the attic;
never let it kiss his back.
Grown, he pawned it,
kept the ticket,
went on eating buttered steak.
At that long table where the guests are faceless
he was faceless, chewing on his years,
exhausting through the ciphers of his nostrils
anonymous smoke, like locks of loose gray hair;
and couldn’t cry, with nothing to put the tears in
and nothing tragic moving in his veins.
Reflecting on a teaspoon he discovered
his teeth were dead jews’ bones.
An awkwardness on Sunday was the jew of him.
A special sense of meat and milk, an eye for noses,
an appetite for fat, a matchstick cross
to crucify a puppet— rot and nonsense.
The jew of him was limp, his hfe was limp,
a this, a that, a chronic indigestion.
Oh God, a piU, a tonic.
In his blood
the desecrated temples burned.
202
BARBARA L. GREENBERG
Rain falls on sjTiagogues in Amsterdam.
In Prague. In Atlrens. In Jerusalem.
Rain falls on sjmagogues and stains tlrem gray.
Rain in Venice
invokes the odor of canals
where Shylock flesh decaj's, decays.
He smells it, he
refuses to he disgusted, he
despairs of knomng
what hideous tilings his own breath might be saying.
A lump of soap is the jew of him.
A yellow band, a hill of bones, a pound of glue.
The thin wool coat a scarecrow wears
warms no one.
He i^ags on a leash of wind, a tail of wind,
a jew, a jape, a nothing much, an edio.
Jesus, he cries, and Hitler Hitler Hitler
but not a sparrow answers with his name.
203
BARBARA L. GREENBERG
Poem for a Dead Aunt
I dream you naked on a float, blown up
enormous and attached to strings
like, in a bright parade, a rubber clown
W'hose painted membrane mi^t,
at any moment in the hot fat sun, explode.
All that trapped air. As if your heart
in a last fit of love let go
a jet of gases and ballooned your skin
ten times beyond its former sense and shape.
Tipped to the sky, your nose, your nipples,
capping the hollow breasts like lewd berets,
and the appalling contour of your belly
that the wind wrinHes . . .
Skipping beside you like a faithful poppet
I blow my message in a paper horn.
“AH a mistake,” I cry, but nobody listens.
“Terrible error,” I teU them. “Cover your eyes
or cover the body over.” Nobody does.
Confetti sprays upon us from dirigibles,
from lungs of fever, and a band brays.
“Cancer,” I bellow. “Cancer and the plaguel”
and turn against you with a sharp thing in my hand.
204
DON SHEA
Never to Visit You
Never to visit
morning held the circle.
My eyes marry
hour by hour
white stripes cut
with your invective.
As one always ruined
you may be consoled.
Curious, nobody turned
to discover the air
moving always.
A direction turns each of us—
I would give the words
difEerently.
A dry month. Lives.
Sheep hold tlie wind.
Night after night
privacy changes.
205
DON SHEA
In the Neivs
In the news
still.
The eartli beats
the slcull.
Secretly the ner\'es
blush less vividly
than before.
Meat hungers
in meditation.
To have seven tulips—
hardly
too soon.
206
DON SHEA
Pale Nctv Lights Cling
Pale new lights cling
to flourish your pillow
differently.
Silken emotions carry
you carefully.
Taste and touch
started these fields.
Your riches sleep
out of speech
passion all the while
behind.
Pale, having loved, the master
enters your window.
All the privacy to be
trembles.
Somebody’s home
at the center of this show.
207
D02h shea
Her Skin Runs— White Stripes
Her sWn runs— white stripes.
The season suspended forms
to count.
His own mounded darkness stains
mirrors.
The maze, all of privacy
to he, trembles.
The candles, like western stars,
grotesquely answer
teeth. Within, sensual inlays
acutely run.
208
Secretive, the nerves dance.
The loom of days washes away hooded night
always.
DON SHEA
The Inhuman Rain Rejoiced
Black, the sun floats melting,
Solitary rocks, moss glow,
Naked, something cringes.
The sun carries mounded darkness
On the side of inland mountains.
Nobody will believe the baby.
Disguised, unnatural ways grew.
High the dark ocean meditates
Something ailing, nameless— a cask.
The elementary mists clutch
Needles fleeing black pastures.
Nothing walks moving out from thorns.
209
DON SHEA
The Magic Idle Windy Spaces
T7ic magic idle windy spaces
alone had not touched
the goat. Ah, soft, a good autumn
advances.
A comer, witli his own, somewhere
softly meets.
At the center of their fingernails,
unquestioning
before,
privacy changes.
210
STAK RICE
Rebirth
If I could be bom an animal;
if I could shed like a snake;
shed, my used tongue;
call softly in one Noun
out of her place
a Woman who would exaggerate notliing and who would bend
dowTi often,
hushing the flesh-eater knovsoi as Literal Knowledge
that the animal inside the animal might immediately
rejoin its Body;
if I could make a Wife out of the womb I stepped from,
of the slim-hipped tissue stepped from
make her;
call softly together the Bride's many-fused tongues,
and grasp them,
and put each of them in my mouth and suck them;
if I could be bom again in my own Body
at last:
many-skinned; naked; quick; freshly-spoken.
211
STAN RICE
The Pier in Berkeley
I am at sea, sort of. The slime is coral. Some idiot’s
campfire has burned a hole
in the wooden pier
as round as a man’s screaming-out. Boy
it is old. Moss like a woman’s hair
grows from the pylons, rises and falls:
but she hangs on. She has to. The earth is her head.
You look down through the silvery-edged opening
and there is the water: a piece of black marble
worked over with an axe.
It moves but it staj^ right there.
You wish you were inland. Your girl
outstretched, hooked through the cheeks,
her hair floating straight up
over the seat-covers. That salt
was so sugary. Come
back.
Incoming tide;
stretched shine and foam over rocks;
silvery lumber;
a porpoise that looks like it swam into a boat’s propeller
lies on the sand.
212
STAN RICE
one dean slit three-fourths tlie length of its hody,
guts pouching like cake icing.
Should you enter?
Must. cant. Must. cant. Must. Entering
that drained girl, inland, ribs
like a ladder under snow, wisb-boned, buttocks
slit by a nearly white shadow,
comes back. Boy
it was simple. Better ,
to be at this black hole burned in the wood by some idiot s
campfire;
scream-hole, scream-hole;
deep as your mother.
213
STAN RICE
Autumn
The glass tells. The wood
that keeps the window the window
tells. We are near Fall. Outside
a branch is being skinned: its true: the meat
is much much redder than the cow.
Tlie clumsily slaughtered leaves tell
we are falh'ng. Now
comes Later.
The trees walk on fire. The Flood
stumbles.
214
STAN RICE
The Power
The TOter ticks in the flowerbed.
Wine.
It makes tlie page move unnaturally. Tonight
think of Savonarola, he looked like an ape,
his cowl, tlie smootli woven hair
of his eyebrows, verj' black, but
he was a powerful man: heretic, dope, he burned,
the wild bum, and as I listen
to this rainfall making nipples in the mud
what power, I wonder, what power
makes the mad-of-tongue (even Joe McCarthy was one)
he so seized that everything goosesteps after?
A leak in the cortex.
That I should want to go out now
(admittedly drunk)
and drop face do\vn and suck the nipples in the flowerbed
. . . that it should actually nourish me,
that acting like a tree I, a man, should not become a tree
makes the world unnaturally vulnerable.
Each woman-woven language ends on this:
power to be loved, to suck, to strangle on it.
215
STAN RICE
On the Murder of Martin Luther King
1 . The young Texan reads a book.
Eaeh night has new meaning
in it. Tonight. Aeschylus, I hear your black and gold masks
thunk in the yard, where each leaf of ivy
comes up,
reaching and sparkling.
Its like a . . . like a , . . party:
the terror hosting the terror hosting
the tendrils. They are white,
their strength coils througli the black yard like
a snake around a chicken egg
it swallows without breaking.
Gold souls in fragile things: Im watching the stars
in the black branches and Im thinking of the meaning
this man's death has.
If it will last.
If any.
Its April,
The guests in my garden
stick out their white tongues under die dirt.
Light will give them color.
It changes the complexion of the mask.
Aeschylus, I hear in my brain rather than in my ears
your deathmask clink against tlie gravel.
216
STAN RICE
This night means I am in it
up to my lips. Kick me.
I am beginning.
He stuck his head up
because the hero is always more visible. Or rather,
he was a hero and therefore his head
stuck up above the sludge we call the flow we live in.
BANGI Aeschylus, you said:
God marks that man with watchful eyes
Who counts his killed by companies;
And when his luck, his proud success.
Forgets the law of righteousness,
Tlien tlie dark Furies launch at length
A counter-blow to crush his strength
And cloud his brightness, till the dim
Pit of oblivion swallows him.
But this is not a literary poem.
I am aware that this is a Poem.
I am singing but I am sinking
into the little black hole
in Martin Luther King’s black law.
Or, as one of his friends put it: “His face just exploded.”
The language got too much.
His life stopped working.
217
QUICKLY AGING HERE
So wliat is a dead Greek to this dead nigger?
'^Flie blackest thing about me is my sexual hair.
At the Vice-President’s fund raising dinner where tlie nc\»,^
came out the Chaplain said;
"Tlic King is dead, long-livc-thc-King-of-Peace-on-Earth.”
Meaning; each night has new meaning in it.
Meaning; we have heard that soft language before and it grew
v/hitc ivy.
Meaning. I am. My black roots arc liair; are
shov/ing.
2. TIic young Texan secs the children with the crushed souls
for the first time.
Suave children blade and brown
stand in my ivy patch
knocking on the openings in bottles
with their palms.
Standing in the wide leaves
each still an car of dew
making the bottles sound like
they arc grief stricken. Children wtliout real eyes
in their heads I tliink
standing in my ivy i^atch
if I struck thdr faces with my palm liglitly
v/ould thunk like bottles
so pure is their emptiness.
218
STAN RICE
The physical world around them a mystery,
no lit animals,
no yellow,
just holes in their faces. The i\'y is more human.
Give them many bottles,
wet their lips with Coke,
suave black and brown bodies full of echoes,
scary as Death in the ivy standing
kneenleep in the green ivy,
beating on the mouths of bottles with their palms,
grieving and smiling.
3. The young Texan returns to the Texas State Fair and sees
the source of his racism sitting in a glass cage over a tank of
Water.
And here is where the niggers wash.
You can kill a nigger at last.
You can throw a baseball at the target hooked to his body.
Now you can pay him back for his sensual blackness.
You can drown him and drowm him but still
he will laugh like a sleek, stupid ape,
because that’s what he is.
Sleek; shiny; the whites of his eyes are yellow;
the brown pupils covered with a mucous blue 61 m;
the teeth. You can make his seat snap open
and down into the white 61 thy water he drops,
his big blaclc hands and feet mixed in the foam,
QUICKLY AGING HERE
staring at you through the glass tank
like an animal that you cant kill,
you cant kill him,
he keeps rising all oily and fresh, like a seal,
taunting you, virile, soiling you, soiled, your victim,
your master.
4. The young Texan re-reads a hook.
Agamemnon's slit jaw on the floor's Lord blooms
like a beautiful idea about freedom.
My vacuumed room will not grow ivy.
April to it is merely a season.
So what?
So let the ears of ivy hear me knocking
on my ears until the crackle
of gunfire forces a bloodred rain from the thunder.
Im sure that Agamemnon's golden death mask is a fake.
Martin Luther King’s skin is awake in my garden.
It talks.
It says: your uncle's, your father’s, your brother’s, your ow’d
bones bones bones
are pale and rotten and crashed and swallowed.
The little black hole in his cheek
sprouts water. Tonight.
I see.
I am.
My own.
Skin’s father.
220
FLOYCE ALEXANDER
The Lotus Eaters
(homage to hlartin Lutlier King, gunned down, Mem-
phis, 4 April 1968)
This is the dance America w^antcdl tire dance of death.
Tlie small animals come out of the ground,
Nothing left of them but their skins and shells.
Saying: Americans, kill what you can’t
Understand.
Sirens! Yellow fire-trails!
The year of the lean wolf stalks America,
Eats its own entrails, devours its children.
Immolation of the children of Asia.
Ambush of the ghost of Guevara in Bolivia.
And now our Gandhi, holed up in Memphis,
Taking a breath of air, leans back on the hotel
Balcony, all the sky, a southern calm, slow drawl
Of clouds, filhng his eyes, before lightning cracks:
Red-necked, corpulent, bom diseased, man-snake
Twisting its scaled body through narrow clefts
In the hills,— white man! who knows how to murder.
And does, the dark-skinned man, a tattoo of bullets
Against the rough-cut cross of his body,— a lesson.
They said, chewing persimmons, spitting snuff,
drinking red-eye.
Vagrants of spittoons, my father, uncle, grandfather,
rifles
Slung over tlieir shoulders, leaving home, glum,
ready to hunt down deer.
FLOYCE ALEXANDER
Aphrodite
This is Jacqueline’s
I
brown, Wack-spotted butterfl/
sailing through meadows to old men
trapped in cities
lights beside your knee
trails you through the door
takes you to her lair to love
eyes beautiful as blue clouds
she likes that greasy slap of sex
the branch between her ihighs
just bom and she can do it to
anyone any time who wants
to catch her heart in a net
222
FLOYCE ALEXANDER
II
I was an old man trapped in a city
She a young mare from Red Bank New Jersey
Wearing her hair cropped, her fingernails sharp
Overweight wth calluses on both heels
Bra-cupped breasts 36-D, hips 50
The smell of her skin like rancid butter
Tibetan holy men would die for her
Yak juice oozing from her body s deepest valley
I found I could sing on her instrument
^Vhile she was talking on tlie telephone
She made no conversation more than once
She came to see me in the city twice
223
FLOYCE ALEXANDER
LiPo
He said how much he had died for the sake
of a poem. It was not much; his hand
quivered, and his body shook in its shell.
The river whispered goodbye, and darkness
began crouching in the shade of the hills.
He rose from the mud and walked upriver,
writing his large letters full of sadness
with tlie edge of an empty wine bottle.
Water trembled and spread in crystal fans
along the shore, swallow-tafled butterflies
sipped from the heavy place where he had sat,
a dark woman splashed happily downstream.
A tiny white moth hovered around him.
The sun opened and closed its sleepy eyes.
Two dogs sniffed his tracks for a scent of food.
A child wandered, crying, thorns in its hands.
Wings spread from the shoulders of the mountain.
He was writing about his memory
of how it had been once in the city,
pockets stuffed with money, and one woman
kissing his ear, turning a dark comer.
He swung his head around once,
his eyes deep amber stones against the glare,
his arm rocking the bottle in an arc
over the foamy bones of his poem.
224
FLOYCE ALEXANDER
Nowhere
Can you see the bird coming through bushes
To this small clearing where I am loving
You and loving every part of the land
Where we lie and come together and writhe . . .
I could see his tail less than twenty feet
Away, erect, a stick growing up, out
Of the broken land, as I watched you move.
Your breasts boiling in the heat of the shade.
Your thighs turning to gold in a cauldron.
The red fever of your lips, and your cries
I heard echoing through this universe.
Eve screaming when she was ripped from the rib
Of a man who looked like me: his cock hard
And plunged deep as it would go into grass,
While his bloodshot eyes kept watching the bird
Hopping tail-high in the grass, in frenzy
And future knowledge that this, too.
Would come alive, this meadow where
The bird watched us fucking the world to birth.
Then, once we were done, rose into the air.
225
FLOYCE ALEXANDER
Guerrilla
for Margaret Randall
Huddled in your house,
your friend's bright red fingernails
tlirow sparks
as she gives the new's :
Diaz Ordaz is closing the gas stations!
A day in Mexico City.
In a month the world will change,
violets humming in the breeze
of loaded bombers
FLOYCE ALEXANDER
whose tiny blue targets are painted in my dreams
with visions of Betty
one winter night stepping out of her panties.
I remember her
here
a year ago writing our name
in blood
across the face of our single shadow
struck against the cold stone of the Z6calo.
Tanks rumble through the squares of Prague,
through the plazas of Mexico City,
bayonets fixed in the streets of Chicago.
When I return
her closet’s half full and the house empty,
cold as a lamb losing its first wool.
The rust}' gate is opening.
Are the granaderos coming?
The life between my legs
has never given birth.
I have a machete in the car.
Tire gas still flows.
September 1968
227
FLOYCE ALEXANDER
Poem for a Painter
Compare needles to the shrewd injectors of the State;
A poisoned porcupine dead in the road.
Run down by a one-armed night-blinded veteran
Who counts the birds he leaves sprawling behind him;
Not enough living things have fallen from the sky.
Another man who fights wars in his head
Remains aloft. Puncture his spread arms, doctors,—
Mendicants of eighteen years of our lives,—
And he drops with deflated flaps of skin at his sides.
Plummeting to another sky that turns all ice.
May conservationists take him for a murdered bird.
Then turn, faces strung together like beads,
Reach out and make a perfect capture of themselves.
One-armed in your nineteenth year, sit out the sun.
Become an owl flapping througli the burnt shape of the moon.
'Soon there will be nothing left alive above ground,’
You say, leaning your body down canyons;
'I paint what it means for a tortoise to live.’
228
ROCHELLE RATNER
An Artist Paints Dawn
It is red
like the tears of mother
and gold as tlie spinning earth
beside her grave.
There’s the river in its distance,
brown as god.
But no,
he looks again, as artists must—
the charcoal breath of fathers
blocks his view.
ROCHELLE RATNER
What We Remember
Whispers of the wheatfields
searching night
Brooks half-hidden where
our pebbles skipped
The pickers and their shadows,
heads bowed as if to pray
(we thought each was a god then
and still do)
The whispers of the wheat
where others learn.
230
ROCHELLE RATNER
The Maiden
With a sadness curtained
Windows
Left behind
She steps along a beach
Abandoned now
And with a stick left by a
Wave
Protesting still
Upon sands she knows must
Wander
Scrawls her name.
231
UOCnEr.LK KATNEn
Yellow Apples
J3rooc1h)g,
tJicir fiiccs SOCHI lo shrinic
on bninclics tlial will jicvcr
know !i god
this season's a blislorcd
1
by page.
ROCHELLE RATNEE
Migrant Workers
Digging,
spade and sun will mock
your muffled thirst
But as you stumble westward
. each alone .
let the roots of ancient
fanners
be your sleep.
233
WILLIAM WITHEKUP
On the Death of Theodore Roethke
The papers say he died in a swimming pool,
but that's not the way that poets go.
A poet’s exit is terrible: as his hour
approached tlie wind began to blow,
rattling the windows of his study.
Below the lake shuddered; fish grew still.
Aboye the light soured like spoiling grapefruit,
ind heard the awful rupture
' ■ ^ chorus of worms
laid down his pen
height of his flesh,
/ as done,
Jboney.
like a heavy
WILLIAM WITHERUP
From: Three for Robert Bly
2
In Minnesota the bams are black
against the snow;
there is a muffled, sickening sound
of blows to the heads of cattle.
In bam doorways and lofts
men whose mission it is to clear the state
of everything personal or strange
glance at luminous watches. Some
wait for the poet to step out into tire night air.
They will freeze his body in cross hairs sights,
^ and each rifle has an infrared device
^I''' for tracking souls in darkness and snow.
235
On the Death of The
The papers say he died h
but that's not tlic way tii
A poet’s exit j's terrible: r
approached the wind beg
rattling the windows of h
Below the lake shudderec
Above the light soured li'
He listened and heard th
of petals and steins and a
singing in the compost, I
and went out, feeling the
sensing his time of singin
he who had turned the w<
And he moved through
his dark suit gathering a fc
WILLIAM WITHERUP
The Great White Father
Engineers
found the Great WTiite Fatlier djdng,
caught in a fish ladder at the Dalles.
He wore a rubber mask
that disguised him as an Indian grandmother
and his last words were
“I want to be loved!”
After two centuries of massacring
salmon and buffalo on the dark river floor
he had tried to climb to the light.
The medicine man who was summoned
to sing for the Great White Father’s shadow
had a vision of it slipping down river
towards Portland,
bloated ■with ears and testicles
and human hair.
WILLIAM WITHERUP
Marian at Tassajara Springs
1
I remember your hair
spread out like black moss against the rock,
your skin tasting faintly sulphurous
from the mineral baths,
your laughter like a spring
swelling up
from the lime and chalk of your pelvis
and flowing out the white stones of your teeth.
I caught the small trout of your tongue
in my mouth.
z
It was October.
The Monarchs were dying,
falling through the air
like the acorn leaves
238
WILLIAM WITHERUP
and landing on the rocks and stones
where they would rest,
slowly nio\dng their faded
orange and black wings
as if they W'ere trying to fan themselves
back into flame.
We talked of the certain end
of our season
as the crumpled ghosts of old lovers
floated past us on the water,
and of something waiting
in cities and in each of us
that is hostile to love
and to rocks in clear streams.
I \vill think of that day
and the TOngs of your shoulders
when the firestorm comes
and the wind
whips my shirt
to black ash and orange flame.
\V TLr,f A M
v,-lT!iK nvv
.’in inf if led \an
ck;* jin’; fiUh it,* caul ftani UicdJy;
fanncl
ilnanira: a inaii; nj-irfatinn
I'ACa tlu: l.'Cht hr'C
r. tin: color of pi;>.
All llit li?c rr.odi.!^
have {intciJ vvindov.^ toiliidd the nairdcrers
and the chrome h lioncxi
to ‘.lash and a\n-c.
'ilic city has complied
by (Irmvinr: n rubber curtain of shnibbcr>'
to enclose the view
and tnufile lire scrcains-
2 d 0
WILLIAM WITHERUP
A Hybrid Villanelle on a Line of Li Po
Drunk on tlie moon, a sage of dreams,
I offer the mountain a shot of bourbon
and I offer you a shot from the hip.
The last full moon I called you on tlie phone,
drank on tlie moon, a sage of dreams,
and talked to a cloud your ear.
Tonight clouds move across the moon
and I write this poem by candlelight,
drank on the moon, a sage of dreams.
Drank on the moon, a sage of dreams
I pick up tlie phone to dial your hair
but the line is dead, tlie mouthpiece a crater.
Two moths have snuffed out in the candle flame.
Drank on the moon, a sage of dreams,
my moth heart crackles in the lunar fire.
You are probably making love tonight,
giving your monk rice wine from the hip.
Drunk on the moon, a sage of dreams,
I piss a bloody wine in the moonwhite dust.
241
EDGAK PAIEWONSKY
Days
My week-days pile in me like dirty clothes.
The door is locked. Is this inside or out?
I keep my Sundays empty as my house.
I Edgarize my hours, towels, nose.
I have ten fingerprints all of my own.
My week-days pile in me like dirty clothes.
Wlrcre heavy chairs stood once in repose,
The little lizards do tlieir push-ups now;
I keep my Sundays empty as my house.
I love the way you talk, so well-composed:
Your words arc like a napkin on my mouth.
My week-days pile on me like worn-out clothes.
Tlie curtains hang like curtains: from their toes.
I write these verses Monday, almost now,
But keep my Sundays empty as my house.
Vve lost the brcatli to say my yes-and-no's.
Between these words the paper sings aloud.
My week-days pile in me like dirty clothes.
I keep my Sundays empty as my house.
242
EDGAR PAIEWONSKY
Icons
Change
compels me more
than responsibility
for change.
one separates tn'O
•
middle
shared
EYES
unity of spirit
behind
dualit}' of form
Holding
the two ends
you hold it
by the middle.
QUICKLY AGING HERE
ends
bend
A net
between
tlie players.
•
Tlie seed goes
outside me
inside you.
•
contact
makes
sound
The motlier bears
the son
that bears the penis.
•
At its peak
it expels
what sleeps
at its core.
Tire whole belongs
as part
of its witliout.
244
EDGAR PAIEWONSKY
Shadow inside light
echoes darkness
outside light.
Perceiving inside
the outside
of ever}lliing else.
Leading out
your body opens
for fatlier and son.
Reflection of the flame
on the wax it melts.
If you loved your dead
you would eat them.
STJICKLY AGING HERE
First
the surface
hardens.
Freer
behind
tlie mask.
Burdened
with what
he is not.
Coming to trust
something in the past
he didn’t have.
It takes us
where we want to go.
We build the house of respect
to keep the guest of love.
•
nothing holds
water together
246
EDGAR PAIEWONSKY
air
air
air
eartli
water
earth
earth
earth
earth
Centrifugal
water slides down
the convex surface.
Down the concave surface
water slides
towards the center.
away
from the center
it multiplies
All
that is given up
remains.
EDGAR PAIEWONSKY
Neighbor
The Polish superintendent snores behind the wall.
A sailor gone super, this man
can ride a pint of Gallo like a tide
to any slanting whore beyond the Bumian Sea.
He never quite made the change of life.
Some wineless night, the cock too hard
and windless for the East,
he’ll either blow his pipes against the wall
or learn to buccaneer a neighbor’s wife.
He would sing to her:
My radiators, cold at these late hours,
vnlL whisper heat
for your wet lingerie and rayon -flowers.
This Polish motherfucker owns a key
to every door in the building.
248
SANDFORD LYNE
The Guest of Our Lovely Daughter
the family takes me in
on the recommendation of their daughter
the rights privileges and possessions of tire family
are accorded me
the family takes me in
no more hunger cold heaviness
how could they know how destitute i am
on the recommendation of their lovely daughter
they give me hot food my owm towel a bed with deep quilts
they ask if i vrant anything put in tlie wash
they give me the key to the bookcase
they show me the place where the liquor is kept
they show me the intricacies of the hi-fi
on the recommendation of their delicious daughter
they go to work
they give me a key so i may let mj^elf in and out
they leave me with their daughter sweet as lobster steaks
how could anyone know how destitute i am
tliey give me their daughter so i may let myself in and out
she says i am mistaken
she goes into her bedroom and closes the door
1 hear her stockings rubbing against each other
as if this were a movie
i hear the music on her small hi-fi
i feel cold
249
QUICKLY AGING HERE
how could i know how destitute i am
i drink the liquor they have accorded me
i go into the room of their lovely daughter
on my own recommendation
i go in up along her stockings
with my hand over her mouth
she stops struggling
she stops breathing her heart stops
i lock her in the bookcase
her mother and father return from work
i poison their drinks i smile at them
their hearts stop
i put them in their bed
i lock that room
how could anyone know how destitute they were
i have taken the family in
250
SANDFORD LYNE
Notes from an Ohio Tavern
1 .
In taverns,
There is a rituality in the careless talk.
The nostalgia of hea^7 animals
Driven from caves and nests,
Sitting on fence posts in bare, moonless fields.
2 .
The Negro at the counter nods
In his draft of Black Label,
Then blows smoke into an empty bottle.
What was it his raotlier told him, years ago?
3 .
White-headed babbler in a booth:
He remembers a snow tliat fell all night
Through the eaves of his attic room.
It was a foot high on his quilts by morning.
4 -
So many here tonightl
The jukebox sings in voices
QTJICKI>y AGING HERE
They all can imitate.
It tells them they are loved.
5 *
Tlie high school coach
Who can no longer arouse enthusiasm in boys:
His hand rests on the basketball-lcneed woman
Who cheers his victories
And forgets his losses.
6 .
It is closing time.
And tlic snows drift in the shadowless streets.
They will walk home, or drive.
Moving like beavers
In black water
Under ice
Toward huts of sticks.
252
SANDFORD LYNE
Foem for a Selfpitying Friendf for Lost
Loves
It is over, it is
life
burning out, only now
you have been permitted
to feel
;i: its
sore flame. Look in your mirror,
say Loser.
Scum off the dried
material of her kiss.
It is life, the burnt offering of it,
it is
a
pilgrimage, give
your heart
like a stone to the wind’s wonderful
drill.
25
SANDFORD LYNE
Home-Made Peach Ice Cream
Smoke-eyed lover, mouth
smeared uath irresistible fruit, hair
bleached to tlie bone,
patched traveler
in yoke,
in underwear bearing
the skidmarks of my rectal disasters,
I have pissed into the tin hole
of the book of women
in a hundred sordid tovTOs.
There, in graffiti,
in words barred
and soldered together
like second-hand headboards of Hollywood beds,
I hear my name repeated: kid, poet, pig, my best .
One struggle is finished:
we are prone
to be the bodies of ourselves, rising
on struggling frogkicks
in the light of God,
beamed up.
giggedi
254
SANDFORD LYNE
So, but for this quaintly ribbed flesh, puffed
organs of oozing browm
and spitting
purple, residue-makers, under the sail of skin,
tliis transporter of riches, plasma
and odors, belly-hold of shitloads
from the world’s markets,
and intricate Arabian urinary
pipeline
laid inobtrusively in
along the dazzling, hot folds,
we would be two mating boneheaps, mantis-
fossil in the tall dying grass,
bone on bone on
bone in the evaporating rock.
SANDFORD LYNE
Star-gaze Poem
In whatever galaxy,
I believe there must be creatures like ourselves,
dreamers,
savages,
poets,
builders of canoes,
far-scattered eyes moving
against the twinkling darkness of the heavens,
pilgrims
in equivalents of dust,
singers of small laments:
the ones we also know,
so well.
So,
for one such as me
this earth is enough of the possibility of grace.
I step out on my small porch, gaze:
tliese tiny lights, these beacons, bobbing
so far away in the night
we
cannot hear their bells
marking
the shallows of the universe.
256
SANDFORB LYNE
The Dog
The old, shade-baked dog bolted
off the porch,
the plowboys in a beat-up Chevy yelling
like wet flags, a towel
wnrapped in the hubcap. By the time
the dog caught up, he looked
like an enraged sud, running on stilts.
With a mercy that expects greater gore
the boys held off
the acid-gun from his eyes.
His snarling teeth
clinched in on tire towel, took the bait,
took on
down his whole length the spin
of the tire, like
a Woodstock on a lathe, his head
mapped turban-fashion like a splayed
Saracen. He felt everj' bone
snap and puncture
some inexpendable organ.
QUICKLY AGING HERE
even for a dog.
When the towel worked loose
from the bloody
ornament of the smoking wheel, he did
not convulse or 3'elp,
or die. But standing
kneedeep in his dropping guts, he took
the middle
of tlie road, and waited.
M^en the car turned around, came back
in a whine, he
planted himself like an iron
pick, met the grill
face to face, sent
his whole insides up the hood, the windshield, like
the world’s biggest butterfly, blocked
tlie entire vision
of the onrushing earth, the shoulder,
ditch,
telephone pole, the
falling sky
in die kingdom of dog.
258
PETER FELLOWES
A Change of Heart
Antlers of a buried intelligence
I would have called you,
nerve ends of the Earth
cracked through to hear me now
this evening say forgive me, Mr. Tree—
there’s nothing left between us.
Once you bolstered the sky for me,
I deliquesced up through your arms
and sucked the heavens drj'.
We<were the sum of incidence,
consumers of every meaning.
We’ve dreamed too much!
and dreamed away the sticks and stones.
From branch to twig,
thoughts rarefy and lose their heads.
PETER FELLOWES
In the Garden
I said I'd let life battle it out
like real life and let the weeding go—
now look, spuds sunk, m3' beans cashiered,
five rows of seedlings, missing, presumed dead—
what a failure! a frail platoon
of jaundiced, nude cornstalks is all that's left;
and who’s to say who’s at fault; it was
surely a death wish on both of our parts.
Now the pumpkin climbs the grape arbor, flourishes,
tlien falls— a fatal concussion. And smell,
the onions and mint patch seed the air—
it’s a crazy salad we breatlie! and a battle
just breathing. Sliould I prune the day back,
gas tire cats, turn my poems loose-or what?
Must I kill to live? or let live?
ril move to an apartment, keep goldfish.
And here, friend Steve’s washed, dispensable face
stops in for a beer— I’m tln'nking,
will he die in his black Volkswagen? or live
to perish like the carrots, getting
only dirt to stick to his ribs?
Is life a moral drama, I wonder,
or merely the weatlicr? and offer him chips.
Who planted you under a drainspout, Steve?
260
PETER FELLOWES
With me it was spores in the peach fuzz,
a costly pubescence— my fix
when I hit the black earth, blushed
like a radish and perished from chagrin.
I remember pitiful pink shades,
the bruised frowns of genitals— confusing flesh.
It’s a crazy salad, so terribly
serious and all the time foolish, like sex.
And who wins? I’m dead, my life an object
I collect on shelves, on paper, a choice retrospect—
or I live, regardless as a cucumber’s green.
One death means nothing; we’re costive or loose
and either way we’re addling
over what it all meant. It’s crazy,
but where’s escape? One life is nothing too—
not us, we’re only a passing mood.
261
PETER FELLOWES
Predator
—for Elliott Coleman
Landscapes are all we get
the barest line of a hill
thwarted by a house
tliis cloud not really very like
the whale, just cloudy
all we get is the tree
black, green, and windblown till it falls
four elements
agenda
and this bird from nowhere
sent by no one
auguring nothing
this bird
who brings the taste of meaning
naturally as flight, or seed
he later eats
we stalk you in our sleep.
262
PETER FELLOWES
Hero and Holy Man
Who paid his way in flesh sticks
through tlie world
like so much wampum
traded for the light of day
and saw it inexplicably each time
in place upon his forehead
and nonetheless bore onward— where else?
Wlio saw them dead
walk right up to him
and let him know how they felt
and let them drink,
hearing them out,
till he got out of there,
and didn’t let it get him down.
Who fought phantasmagoria
with humans on their breath,
black-livered gods, and lived
to kill the wickedest of men
and stiU sleep well
QUICKLY AGING HERE
beside his handsome wife.
Ke did this.
Who might have bellyached
to taste those holy breasts
until his cheeks at last
did pouts^ flopped out and breasty
and he spouted senseless words
of hidden and dark meaning,
missing all this other stuff.
Quick witted, quick!
■whose teeth would soften, slush,
his eyes turned yellow o\'er
v.'hile he ruminated tluis,
he gumming out his poems,
"'O light, O dolorous light,
there is no goodness in nsf'
264
PETER FELLOWES
View from an American Window
On a rainy day, a slcy
a child might water color,
letting his feelings out and run togctlier
in purples from tlie pavement up—
But here, you’ve seen the cliehds before,
tliese people too laundered, and earnest,
this eomer too busy, too lonely later.
Your face isn’t face, Mr. Person,
no kidding: the trees don’t grow in bouquets,
they shriek, tearing tlieir hair out.
A face doesn’t look like a face.
You want to paint yourself in
in dangerous, cooked-alive reds,
a brilliant crustaceanl Do.
Across the world, for peace,
die ignorant armies are clashing,
clashing with Maryland, witli windows,
with Matthew Arnold’s despair.
Day curls in our hands, brave hearts!
COLETTE INEZ
Cold Waltzes
Tv.irled down tlie years
dizzying the sleet,
our fingers blue and toucliing.
No music tharved
tlie arctic smile—
that gash our faces wore.
Were quill stiff spines
in the ballroom v/oikl,
ah, such cold waltzes.
266
COLETTE INEZ
Unaware that Avessek . .
Berries on the outwash plain,
mudflat, ester, hole
and s\vainp
enclose the summer
he clings to
like a dozing lemur
in the croft of a tree.
Wrinkling the image
of drenched pines,
their peaks in the river,
he leaps
in the water,
unaware that Avessek,
Pharaoh of the North,
commands the ice
to go southward,
that,
outmost at the Arctic Pole,
cold sabres gash
a trembling sun.
COLETTE INEZ
Sauerkraut Talk Shreds in His Ear . . .
Sauerkraut taEc shreds in his ear;
the night supine and breaking wnd.
Chekov’s “Life is cabbages and quarrels”
comes to mind
and how years growled
in time's distended stomach.
Flo at tlie end of tlie table
riffling through old recipes,
how her titties once were snow peas,
hair butter)', pepper-firm ass . . .
even the world was firmer
when they rolled through cscarolcs of summer
curled in the heart of tlie leaves.
268
COLETTE INEZ
The Woman Who Loved Worms
(From a Japanese Legend)
Disdaining butterflies
as frivolous,
she puttered with caterpillars,
and wore a coarse Idmono,
crinkled and loose at the neck.
Refused to tweeze her brows
to crescents,
and scowled beneath dark bands
of caterpillar fur.
Even the stationery
on which she scrawled
unkempt calligraphy,
startled the jade-inlaid
indolent ladies,
whom she despised
like the butterflies
wafting kimono sleeves
through senseless poems
about moonsets and peonies;
popular rot of the times.
No, she loved worms,
blackening the moon of her nails
269
^^ICKLY AGlT^n
»’»(? and slug,
Zd^'^ gnd«;
case of beetles,
Sif •'';'.'™''l«, Hlcycirs.
fS’isr-'
Sfl'I.’lfdug by ,1 J
P^oposinn urin ^
1 cond/l /o„c
inarr/age.
J J-'iI She stoned uua,
<'»«« pinchmg dirt, '
crawled to death's co
flagging a moth to i
«i the long aftcinorjc'
270
COLETTE INEZ
For Denise McNair
(bombed in Birmingham,
Alabama, September 15, 1963)
Testified that Miss McNair
on an Alabama Sunday
in the colored church,
the reverend saying:
“e\dl and good share
God's light”
when the pews blew up,
walls caved, ceiling crashed,
did hereupon
plunge down
to the brown earth
hawng learned her testament;
the meek inherit dust.
271
COLETTE INEZ
Slumnight
T.V. gunning down
the hours
serves as sljcriff
in a room
where one yawn
triggers oif anotiicr,
sends time scuffling
into night.
Wars slugged out
on vacant lots
sign an armistice
with sleep.
Turned to a wall,
die children dream
and the moon pulls up
in a squadcar.
272
COLETTE INEZ
Force of Snow
What went out
of the house
(refuse, smoke,
fumes of roast,
a hausfrau love
for placed things),
that ice grips
the mansard roof
contracts the frame
of a wizened door?
Inside, cold to colder
fires,
soil the grate
she scrapes for heat.
The mansion’s lady
sets the clock
to ring on summer;
green caved in
on porches,
pine branch sawng
QUICKLY AGING HERE
down tlie light.
No hounding love
hept at bay,
howling rage
held back.
The force of snow
on the house, a weight
of dimming sense.
She hears lier mind
unwinding
music from a dented horn
and lets things
come to rot.
274
WILLIAM BROWN
m
An Exchange of Letters On
Suicide Porpoises
It was witii horror that I read in the New York
Times of April 23 a news report that Navy
scientists have trained porpoises, carrying explo-
sives in body harnesses, to ram enemy subma-
rines. . . . How can anyone engage in securing
the confidence of such especially friendly crea-
tures as porpoises and then plan to shatter them
to bits? —ASHLEY MONTAGU
I
Dolphins Rampant
No longer do they romp out to sea
with our hberty tucked away
in the lower instincts.
They are explosive now, half human
and skiUful as a fine circuit.
Floating for years on the bottom,
our submarines have grown gills.
Their crew's, all memories of land
fading, are pink as entrails.
They do not need any light
but their ghostly sonar, or health
while the torpedo tubes are clear
of tumors.
On land,
wandering now and then into our bodies.
275
QUICKLY AGING HERE
we feel our sluggish limbs
float in the air; and play,
the fugitive, comes home
to a false pardon. We are waiting,
our heads above water,
with jobs to do. Aimless
as children, we are all armed.
Porpoises are no doubt espcdally friendly crea-
tures, but has Professor Montagu never tried
making friends with a draftee? — b. f. SKiNNTiK
ir
Furthermore . . .
. . . we have plans to train tigers
in a unique rage for the finer things.
Elephants with a sense of property
wll stamp out brush fires,
squirrels bearing sly diseases
w'll nest in the collectives. Tlieir brains
wall be little radios
to rally tlic longing kulaks.
WILLIAM BROWN
Freedom forever in the Animal Kingdom!
They will consort vsdth our agents
for nothing. We’ll give up meat
and eat grass out in the fields
and the seals will be our coast guard.
We’d let them be, like women
and the old— we have dogs of our own
at home, and goldfish—
we’d do it ourselves, with our bare
teeth and hands, but the Beast
is everywhere, and we are so few.
277
I L I. IASI T\nO N
Man in the Street
Ill's nioulli IS open,
Jiis fingers Irnil in the gutter.
I enn't malic out if he’s
drunk or dead. And of wliat?
It will be ncccssar}*
to touch tlic strange skin
of his n'rist, peel back lJ»c lid
and look lu'm in the eye.
If he had not fallen
here, I could be elsewhere,
forgetting m3' good name. Tliat name—
it has made me a witness
who must administer first aid.
Dead man, rise up, go away.
278
WILLIAM BROWN
Minding Our Own Business
Daily the rooms in which
it’s safe to talk loud
get colder. Tlie food gets worse
and our prettier women talk about leaving.
It wasn’t so hard,
guing up our fiances and cars,
with guns trained on our heads.
Indignant, our friends raised money
to help us stay. But we found it
safer to drop out of sight,
wait for the new moon
and sail off in small boats to get here.
Joking as we arrived,
we proclaimed festivals with floats,
queens and hard drinking to celebrate
tlie quiet victories we planned on.
Our houses were gay
as comic strips. Our music
QUicjrr.y acinc hi; he
wn'; bcMcr {hnn before, nnd dicnjJi'r,
l^Jainiy fire best t.sient r/rf rnury with us.
Hut K'ilcly even (bocc incruis
h.-n'C dm'ncllcd. Aw.irc tliat our clionis
is slurring its linrder notes, the slickest
among us see through it nil and gain admirers.
And yesterday, finding
the cciihf from our string quartet
dead its his garden, in's jrockets full
but his tliroat slit, we imposed a curfew.
Mesmwlu'le v.-hat sjrics we can afford
double against ns
or s'anisli. And only tlicy
can tell us what raids arc planned
and which new
politicos mean trouble. For wcclcs
all we’ve heard from them
svas a fev,' numbers, circled invisibly
among the baseball scores
in yesterday's paper. After
ten seconds over a c.andlc it came up
saying: “Freeze. Tlic enemy is among you.”
280
ILLIAM BROWN
American Patrol
More on a mission
than a stroll, he finds the
Alley of ^^^liskers, where
his cohorts spread their limbs
like driftwood, halfway between
the two oceans.
The stor\^ will be how tliey
washed up here from the chic edges
of the land Mth lives
they tell like jokes. After
the men describe
sex with the bright and Mrj' companions
they dreamed would sootlie their twenties,
tlie boys, lonely for their casernes,
name off tiie cheap
resorts of Italy and tlie dark cities
of tlie East
tliat they could not destroy. “She’s hiding,”
say the men, “among her husbands.”
“They drilled us,” say tlie boys,
“for 30 months
281
QUICKLY AGING HERE
"and warned us about spies,
but sent us home
unwounded. To hell with their cities,”
Sooner or later
they come to deserts
where, years ago, they heard
the radio blast hours
of music to hide
die news from Washington and Pyong-yang
and girls
told them their futures. They
do not love their secrets.
For a beer
they tell all to tlie first
confidant. They ply him with hot
numbers in Rimini,
in Frisco, in Cannes. They tell him
how their guns worked, and why,
and, in the end, show deeds
to acres somewhere
none of tliem want to go.
282
aLLlAM BROWN
"^^ondering How
Mine are the tactics
of the small burglar, watching
the statute run out
on his last haul.
I cart}' the passport
of the fabled horn of plenty.
Prices rise against me,
cigarettes get me down.
As I am bought and sold
by speculators, giddy
on my futures, I daydream
of imminent brotherhood.
The wisdom of Ben Franldin,
his French orgies,
his passion for himself
serve me as a soul.
QUICKLY AGING HERE
I share with the world's peasantry
a wish for the big harvest
where I shall be both
green giant and hanged god,
reborn in the rice fields.
As the state rears
like a comic dragon,
spitting fire, I go
unarmed, with no leader.
The saintly assassins
break wildeyed into my solitude
and explain their plans.
I listen. I have yet
to enforce my will
on the home ground. I vote
by getting in the way.
284
GERALD BUTLER
Five Sections
From: This Side of Orion
Sancho Panza, someone lias said, stands between Don
Quixote and God. The two men have two voices, arguing.
Cerx'antes, in his lucidity, his genius, resolved tliem into hvo;
but the Muse merges the two %'oices into one song. Tliat song
constitutes what, in literature, we mean by Beauty.
1
Flash
The reason why all colors look deeper
when you're taking a walk after a morning
of making long love is because
it is later tlian you thought it was.
The reason why all colors look darker
is the tivilight in the long muscles
you walk witli to go buy eggs. One thing
tliat’s ever}'xvhere is the night coming on.
The Great Nebula in Orion
even wewed with an opera glass envelops
the tip of his sword with a spermy haze
and in the winter the constellation hangs
over the black bucks of lower Berkeley.
They creep out of their ghetto
into Cadillacs to contemplate each other’s
285
QUICKLY AGING HERE
headlights in the all night drive-in restaurant.
Tliese neighbors of mine see I am good to people,
to women, and so do not mind that I,
a white man, have, for religious reasons
and low rent, encroached on their district.
If you make love all morning, you
eat breakfast in the afternoon: but if
you're out early, you can also deepen colors
with sunglasses, since they are holy objects.
286
GERALD BUTLER
5
Malcolm X, talking to the City:
“Talce a walk in my head
where dew could stroke your ankles
and where there are
names to give small animals
the rainbows
of whose invisible flight you hear.
You could hunt them perhaps
with the wide trees
of Africa around you
287
QUICKLY AGING HERE
and with your dreams made of leaves,
of mud, of the sky between ruffled feathers,
all around you:
antelope would come.
The season for antelope would come,
filling the air with honor.
All breaths, could be caught together
in the gathering and the fire
kept transparent by the stars.
Take a walk in my black head,
heave back the rainbow, hack
the plain to acres
till I spit all the dream out.
Breathe on the plain and bum it off
till I vomit up the shame
sweet as the dawn there is in hell
when the ghosts of the animals
pass through your white hands.”
288
GERALD BUTLER
11
Morphine combined v/ith scopolamine is called
TMIight Sleep- Tlie mother still feels the pain
but remembers nothing. Demerol and barbiturates
do the same thing. Though what they usually use
is spinal but not continuous caudal anesthesia,
a saddlebloch, and this makes you feel nothing
but sharp pains in the diaphragm when he kicics.
Some of these I’ve even tried myself, once even
ate a tablespoon of belladonna, that deadly niglitshade
they used to put in v/itches’ brev/s: and saw
eucalyptus trees dance, cool silver leaved dykes
playing Mozart on their pianos until
a gang of migratory workers came
and set the hill on fire, outraged wetbaclcs,
and I started hitchhiking out of there.
I found the trees again, safe now
in the parking meters or telephone poles,
in anything tall, but the streets of those
farming California towns, Stockton where you could see
a Mexican house bum down
290
GERALD BUTLER
and the fire department not make it, the streets
were blockaded with piles
of terminal syphilitics, armless, legless, blind,
pimpled like me. It took such poison
to let me see flesh. One night
I smoked some marijuana and got so high
I couldn’t tell which way the streets ran,
couldn’t add, could barely understand
the speedometer numbers which was tlie only w'ay
I could tell how fast I was going.
But I got home safe.
And put dowm drugs forever because
I’d found I was something, call it
just a pile of inhibitions, tliat would never get high,
that drove. And on my birthday,
for which you made me a cake, gave me
a pint of Hennessey and a notebook for my poems,
I came up to watch you eating the cake,
you not watching, a small boy in me came up
to my eyes. Sometimes when we make love
he comes and stands by the bed. Tlien I feel
lust. He has never touched you.
Proud girl who wept, who hated the pain,
I stood beside your bed
and kept trying to assure you, it’s all right,
everything is going to be all right,
and thought to myself I would never touch you
again except tenderly. And then
your whole frame shook under the sheet
and the water broke.
GERALD BUTLER
12
But usually, words fill our heads, which we bring
close together while each of us keeps looking
to see if the other's eyes are still opened,
and when the kiss comes it's
another poem, speech, or bit of gossip.
And do you know what he said? He said
he'd paid a hundred dollars for Bums’ novel course
and got nothing out of it, said, that Wayne Bums
is nothing but an egoist.
What did he want to hear?
Why flowers turn toward the sun,
or why, in New York City, they have a train
that goes sixty blocks without stopping
to get all the Negroes to Harlem in a bundle,
Clifford Brown, the great young trumpet player,
and I think Benny Goodman years ago
played a tune of it, "A-Train.” Well,
for his hundred dollars
he wanted to know what flowers think
of subways, he wanted poetry, felt
292
GERALD BUTLER
in the questions that Bums kept raising
himself swelling up like a deep breath
and grew afraid, demanded poetry.
He wanted the classroom to be
a field of flowers, admittedly wildflowers,
but all turned toward the sun
which Bums refused to be.
Isn’t it possible for a book to have
a scene that’s not telling anything, not
trying to convince us? You can point
without preaching, say: take a look,
which is different from the way an advertisement
shows a product, from that showing
which is also a way of hiding.
In other words, can’t we do something
more than lie? Music fills our heads,
blossoms into nothing, into this speechless hard
penis I have to love you witli,
you who have opened to me
more than any flower can, you who are
more than any flower, more fragrant than
your skin I’ll call a nigger, your woman’s skin,
because I am not smelling you now, softer
than the petals you have between your thighs
because I am not touching them now,
you I am not trjang to pierce now
or sell anything to, you who are swelling
beyond what I paid for you, woman I was afraid of,
wife I come in tonight.
DAN GILLESPIE
To New Jemsdem
In 1846
tlie burning of Nauvoo
lit the sky with a ruin of light.
Brigham Young
drove his church
over tlie frozen river
and a wild continent
to his New Jerusalem.
They knelt in the snow
to pray for a prophet lost,
shot at Carthage, Illinois.
Darkness gathered in the cold
and hung in the branches
of dead trees,
in 1846.
Today,
driving over the plains
where the bones
of buffalo and Indian
enrich the soil.
294
DAN GILLESPIE
I filled the belly of my mind
TOth wldflowers,
the ringing of lost bells
and white wagons,
gleaming beneath
the wesrivard sailing sun.
I stopped
to mail a postcard
back to Salt Lake.
The ruin
of Omaha lit the sky
with a burning light.
I drive eastward,
into that fire.
dan Gillespie
Poem for the Disappearing Bear
■iJie Dear
from tJje mountain
sits in a tide pool,
iroge thighs spread
to waft upon death.
^ garland of help loops hfs skuJI,
and a glittering mosaic
of crabs
hang and swing from his back.
296
DAN GILLESPIE
Two squid,
suckered to a rock,
observ'c this incongruous monster,
only half-believing.
Beyond the white waves
hea\y swells begin to build
and move from Asia.
The cold sea deepens.
Close your eyes, old bear,
Tlxere is nowhere else to go.
Tire dark waters
began on your green mountain.
Thej' end here.
Above,
your Major Brother whirls away
in his ocean,
seven points of light
in search of a wilderness.
297
DAN GILLESPIE
For d Bum Seen Walking the Rails
I stopped to watcli you,
in mountain country in midwinter,
your jake-leg stumble
of old nightmares and dangerous gin
moving you as it will in the snow,
thirty years lost
losing count of invisible ties
beneath rails
and thought of my father
and pale girls
begging rides with the truckers
in 1933,
Chicago to St. Louis, New Orleans
or Amarillo.
I think of you
born to a country
where the crooked bone
could not endure, living out
a broken time,
kneeling over a fire
of rags and grease, watching
wind whirl tlie cold
through old trees
298
DAN GILLESPIE
and my fatlief s Oklahoma sun
darkening with dust,
you in salt s^veat and frost
these thirty years
a river of crushed rock
flowing beneath your eyes,
now in this western snow
lost all these years
while America
found itself again in profit and chrome
and you jerking on crippled legs
down the rails,
blind in this whiteness,
stiU searching for your country.
DAN GILLESPIE
For a Bum Seen Walking the Rails
I stopped to watch you,
in mountain country in midwinter,
your jake-leg stumble
of old nightmares and dangerous gin
moving you as it will in the snow,
tlrirty years lost
losing count of invisible ties
beneath rails
and thought of my father
and pale girls
begging rides vidth the truckers
in 1933,
Chicago to St. Louis, New Orleans .
or Amarillo.
I think of you
bom to a country
where the crooked bone
could not endure, living out
a broken time,
kneeling over a fire
of Tags and grease, watching
wind the cold
throu. ■ -irees ' ' '
DAN GILLESPIE
and my father’s Oklahoma sun
darkening with dust,
you in salt sweat and frost
these thirty years
a river of crushed rock
flowing heneath your eyes,
now in this western snow
lost all these years
while America
found itself again in profit and chrome
and you jerking on crippled legs
down the rails,
blind in this whiteness,
still searching for your country.
DAN GILLESPIE
Desert Gulls
When these inland gulls
swept down on fields black with crickets
the Mormons
thought them doves sent from heaven
to save their crops.
The green wheat took root,
ripened and turned pale in the sun.
Now the hills of wheat are gone.
No one remembers
that wnter of Puritan endurance
when hunger was not yet history
and the gift of white birds.
300
DAN GILLESPIE
Once, plowing a field
on a forgotten island
in the Great Salt Lake,
a flight of gulls
swirled out of a cloud
and settled on the broken ground,
thousands feasting in the furrows
I had made. I stopped the tractor
and standing in that field
felt the miracle mo\'ing again
that brought a prophet
and his people
to their knees
in a blizzard of doves.
301
DAN GILLESPIE
Abandoned Copper Refinery
In rooms of stone
men thought tlrese hills of slag
bright seed, black roots
gripping into a bedrock of profit
Now the shell of the mill,
hollow as a worked out mine,
is silent
save for tlie chatter of birds
that nest in girders
under the sagging roof.
In a cold oven
two dogs growl and lock
in love.
Outside,
where the broken river
curves rich with the yellow sewage
of upstream cities,
on a mountain of black slag,
a lizard sleeps in the sun.
302
DAN GILLESPIE
Strip Mining Pit
See where blach water
slips dowTi tlie brolcen spine
of roclc,
do^vn the ribs
of the hill, this stricken,
bony thing,
brown skeletal sprawl
stripped (efBciently),
by dragline
and digging rivulets of rain.
Rip it open
and the dark heart
gleams with promise,
with profit.
As thus, tire prophet
sayeth,
lift your eyes
(to this wretchedness),
reach into
the rib cage,
grab a handful of heart
and run like hell.
303
FANNY HOWE
Jasmine and the Gypsies
Jasmine sees intentions everj'where
She skates up the avenue
wearing shades she sees people tlirough—
right inside
she reads a mind like ice
Circumstances
she saj's is what brought her here:
not like her will On the bus
she formulates a trutli bouncing
and forgets
Her brightest trait
is playing dumb Unzipping a smile
with questions
men turn into wizards For presents
they turn up Tarot cards
All her doctors are out to lunch
when she comes in
Twelve pairs of spectacles pills new teeth
is what she gets
She shaves herself between the legs.
304
FANNY HOWE
2
It's not death honey
scaring me
but ahh I’m lost I really am conscious
of being
not alone in that particular emotion.
One night I landed let’s say
bustedl
in jail called to the king
of the gypsies
for a hand him being like a friend.
So what do you get?
Been stoned
by rain: a drop a sore Not merciful!
So long thinking
the king ditched me Dead
leaves blew in the park
She scuffs
chin up hands pocketed she drops
on a bench
waiting to get lucky.
305
QUICKLY AGING HERE
3
Today like every day waiting
she holds back
the shade The radiator steams
like a train
She writes poetry
love poems to nobodyl Snow
on the streetlights
puts her in the Ice Capades
whirring solo
ballet on black ice for black eyes, nobility.
But shining
in the shower her poem changes
colors like her skin
Fm a walking globe from Africa
to Ireland ...
Liveliest her nights when
she hangs
by tlie window of her dreams gawking
at forms
as human as words.
306
FANNY HOWE
Two Shots: a Love Affair
Before
Will you love
come to bear
us together
unhappy children?
It will later
be like this:
I’ll know how
I found you
till somebody asks.
QUICKLY AGING HERE
After
Drinking
a long glass
of pain as purple
as grapes that stained
our lips
last summer
Drinking
ambrosial poison
I’ll go on my way
disguised
as a child:
our own unborn.
308
FANNY HOWE
The Com Dance
1
She made her appearance at noon.
Soft bells jingled
like cotton
v.ith drums; silver fox fur
sprigs of evergreen
on limbs soaked red for
the com dance, August.
Her baby was stripped
of flesh
swaddled in furs and bells, rusted.
She heard through cotton
his small feet
on the soft dust pounding
and all his fathers calling oh.
Once she revived him
with yucca and gourd
or wild aster, his favorite blue.
Once she could feed him
sunflowers.
The sun was their forest;
she couldn't see the trees for the sky.
3C
QUICKLY AGING HERE
When the Spanish came
with laces, mosaics and knives
the white men entered
smiling.
With her mummified baby,
a broken dish,
under the Catholic altar
they hid like Jews.
Overhead people
ate caviar
their pale fingers stained black.
Fishbones, seashells stuck
in the vegetation
where she fell; her breasts dripped
to feel the skeletal teeth of her child
nip and swill.
2
Today
in thin ozone we turn
around and landscapes
attach
your hand to mine.
We walk on the ghost of the sea
in scratch and sun.
310
FANNY HOWE
We go over
the evergreen mountain
our spirits high . . .
below, adobe walls
as angular as cows
are grazing
around a pockmarked skull.
The ocean just dropped
eleven thousand feet.
We can see the sun
set five times
by walking in circles down.
In the shade of aspens
we stop to smoke.
What a miracle
we are here both in the same year.
You might have stayed
in Spain.
Your camera
sees more than your eye, sensations
inwsible; you know
nxncKi.r acikg in:r,r
To a Suicide
Tliis was different
tlie ^^•ay you might hear a sound
on the floor of a desert
or the heart just before sleep
cabbage in its old sack
holding cverytliing . . .
In the city
doors locked themselves
and the weakest buildings tremored
and clutched their addresses . . .
From the window die moon
blossomed in rows on your teeth . , .
CKAIG STEEEY
Montana Visit
I
Bearded relatives I never knew
burrowed into the moonlike landscape
actual!}' made things grow
and when it got better they
called out vives from the East
who ate potatoes and grew thick and
inarticulate each year dragging babies
from childhood as though childhood
were some kind of sickness.
The sons stayed scared by tradition
take stairs now one at a time
are stifF in the cities they visit
would rather walk than ride.
And their sons
live like businessmen from the tovai
cajole the same ground
their tools in bright colors
lace on their boots like
delicate instruments
kiss their thin city %vives
and coax grain to grow in such
grade and quantity that it
bends the father in shame
like an old spoon.
314
CRAIG STERRY
Now I come here a \asitor
foreign as tlie govenimcnt
guilty as a sailor bringing back
a new disease.
It is my going that infects
\^t 11 empty out their beds and chairs
transforming all tlieir new macliines
to old despairs.
II
Already there are
aunts in Seattle
cousins from Oakland
who nev'er come back
except for funerals.
And there is evidence
from talk in the bars
that even the seasons may not continue
responsibly, may shift
and be lured by strange facts
of gravity
pulling the rains to the deserts of Nevada
or Mexico.
CRAIG STERRY
III
I have come back for reasons of desperation
to repay desperation.
I will be the stone, picked up and flung
and followed
as others followed what was flung
to this place.
Going \wll be given
by those who stay
and it will be taken by those who go
cautiously as the arms of mothers
teaching sons
to dance.
CRAIG STERRY
Dream Poem 7rl
I TOS driving north
in Canada
in a bus full of different friends from my life
^•as going north to fish
and I stopped along a huge lake
when we saw pieces of debris
hitting the water . . .
We watched ... it was a plane, about to crash , . .
It wobbled and struck the water next to the shoreline
I took off a heavy wool coat, my arms getting stuck
in the sleeves . . .
Lloyd Villet, a scliool friend,
followed me . . .
We swam to where the plane should be
dove douTi, the water w'arm,
lifted the craft by the tips of the wings,
took it up to tlie road . . .
It was suddenly diminished . . , the size of a toy . . .
I opened it and took out three tiny figures— a ma n
and two little boys . . . they were pink like plastic . .
I pushed their small stomachs, water came out their
mouths . . .
I breathed air down their throats, they became smaller .
They woke, lay wriggling in my hand
like baby mice . . .
CRAIG STERRY
Dream Poem #5
I had gone to see a fortune teller . . .
Slie was an old woman and she held my hand
for several minutes . . .
She said
"You’re afraid, very afraid”
"You don’t know who you are”
"You’ll be with us a long time”
318
No One Can Be Trusted,
Something Tells Me . . .
My father is a strange man
who slides from his bed at night,
like a swimmer sliding into dark water,
and floats off to meet the unheard sounds
that cause dogs to go hysterical . . .
As he disappears from sight
his teeth glow wth a soft uranium light
and you can’t make out his words . . .
I think for years now he's been
having many sons
by beautiful, secret Mves . . .
CRAIG STERRY
Thinking of Our Visits
Coming back and
coming back I am
watched by your children
whose eyes are green as
a Mallard's head
and you^ blending smiles
with your medieval wife
and those Mexican girls you keep
dancing hysterically on your curtains . . .
'Thinking of our visits
breaks panic from my blood at night
like a covey of pheasant . . .
'This clock I own
now grinds me through its teeth . . .
I am honey as a knuckle
and sick of my mistakes
knowing even sidev/alks keep themselves alive
v/ith names and dates . . .
My friend, it's this: I’m sexless now
without the names of wife or child,
awkward as the piano
that sits
in a widow’s house . . .
Undocumented Observations
from the Letters of G.
In the manow of the living
families moum their dead
and in their deepest parts
even greater families
mourning . . .
It’s discovered
this has been going on
for some time now
in the simple arteries of ants
in the unsteady skulls of tortoises
making the bones dark and heavy .
This is best seen
when birds
are suddenly afraid
of falling . . .
CRAIG STERRY
Margaret
Upstairs in her room
she gracefully dances
the newest dances
with the tallest men . . .
staggers the air with perfumes . .
chews bits of True Romance . . .
adjusts her mirror . . .
sighs . . .
From where she lies
sandwiched in a garden
of printed sheets
she swears once a week
she hears a man's breath
leaking through the window
glimpses him flashing away
from tree to tree . . .
322
DENIS JOHNSON
A Poem About Baseballs
for years the scenes bustled
through him as he dreamed he was
alive, then he felt real, and slammed
awake in the wet sheets screaming
too fast, everything moves
too fast, and the edges of things
are gone, four blocks away
a baseball was a dot against
the sky, and he thought, my
glove is too big, i will
drop the ball and it will be
a home run. the snow falls
too fast from the clouds,
and night is dropped and
snatched back like a huge
joke, is that the ball, or is
it just a bird, and the ball is
somewhere else, and i ^vill
miss it? and the edges are gone, my
323
QUICKLY AGING HERE
hands melt into the walls, my
hands do not end where the wall
begins, should i move
fonvard, or hack, or will the hall
come right to me? i know i will
miss, because i always miss v/hen it
takes so long, the wall has no
surface, no edge, the wall
fades into the air and the air is
my hand, and i am the wall, my
arm is the syringe and thus i
become the nurse, i am you,
nurse, if he gets
around the bases before tlie
ball comes down, is it a home
run even if i catch it? if we could
slow down, and stop, we
would be one fused mass careening
at too great a speed through
the emptiness, if i catch
the ball, our side will
be up, and i will have to bat,
and i might strike out.
DENIS JOHNSON
Quickly Aging Here
nothing to drink in the
refrigerator but juice from
the pickles come back
long dead, or thin
catsup, i feel i am old
now, though surely i
am young enough? i feel that i have had
winters, too many heaped cold
and dry as reptiles into my slack skin,
i am not the kind to win
and win.
no i am not that kind, i can hear
my wife yelling, “goddamnit, quit
running over,” talking to
the stove, yelling “i
mean it just stop,” and I am old and
325
i wonder about everything: birds
clamber south, your car
kaputs in a blazing, dusty
nowhere, things happen, and constantly you
\vish for your slight home, for
your wife’s rusted
voice slamming around tlie kitchen, so few
of us wonder why
we crowded, as strange,
monstrous bodies, blindly into one
another till the bed
choked, and our range
of impossible maneuvers was gone,
but isn’t it because by dissohing like so
much dust into tlie sheets we are crowding
south, into the kitchen, into
now'here?
DENIS JOHNSON
The Man Among the Seals
—for Ed Schroeder
at night here in the park it is different:
the man by the seal pool stalks
through an acute emptiness, encircled
by the city, is he
taking off his clothes?
by day i have seen
the seals, enclosed, blundering
among the spattered rocks, they climb
like prisoners of a ferris wheel, above
their pool and above
the peanuts floating through
air, high over the sudden, too large
teeth of the spectators, but at night,
without their land-locked captors moving
gracefully by, the seals
seem less inept, even
on the hostile rocks,
before dawn they rise
and dive, becoming masters
in the water, the figure in
327
QUICKLY AGING HERE
undera^ear on the left is not
a seal, before me and
an audience of trees he has
joined the seals, drunk, perhaps,
and, a staggerer on land,
perhaps he hopes to move cleanly,
like a seal, through water, or,
sober, perhaps he dives to assume
the clumsiness now shed by the seals; then
he will tumble drunk onto
the ground, and the seals, plunging
landward, will find
no awkwardness among the rocks, will
no longer wonder deep
within themselves at a dry hardness
which is not ice. each day
he will return, wetness
forever staining through his pants,
to watch his seals as they rise
above the rocks to pluck the floating
bits of food, as they slide through
the air over the trees, the
ferris wheel grown
stationary with shame, the tiny,
unfamiliar bodies jerking
under balloons through tire lighted park.
328
Checking the Traps
morning,
the door opening, changing
into a doorway, half
the night i stayed awake and smoked
and watched the mousetraps,
the mice were there, nudging
into cups and plates, one fell
into the toaster, but escaped.
they waited until i gave up and slept to die.
for these mice
the night will be long, i heard
QUICKLY AGING HERE
the iron snapping
in my sleep and dreamed my wife was
closing the door.
two mice are dead, for my wife,
mice make her legs
go watery, as tliey do sometimes after her climax.
one mouse’s head is barely
in the trap, one eye probing
toward the ceiling where i could tell him
there is nothing.
the other mouse is flung willingly under the iron
bar, i wonder, were they
married? was she pregnant? they are
going out together,
in the garbage this morning, it was
morning when we were married,
it has been morning
for a long time, that mouse, with his
eye. did he hear the iron snapping,
and dream it was his
wife with her stretching, laden tits
closing the door?
330
ALFRED STARR HAMILTON
I was bora in Montclair, N.J. I am 55 years old. I couldn’t afford
a formal education during the '30’s depression. I have been on the
road. I have been a hitchhiker through 43 states on no money at alb
I am familiar Mth Salvation Army centers in tliat manner. I served
(subservience) one year in the armed forces. I was A.W.O.L. I got a
discharge somehow. I am a listed socialist, and whenever I am in-
terested in politics. I have enjoyed reading mostly Shaw, Schopeii-
hauer, Ibsen, Voltaire, Eugene O’Neill, Saroyan, Dos Passos and
Thoreau.
Poets who have influenced me? Well, I am finally that land 0 a
poet who cannot do anything else but poetry. I like Keats. Foe ry is
another world. Poetry is the story of the soul. Poetry is the story ot
the psyche, Music is the sound of the soul. Painting is^ tire pic ure
of the soul. I like Verdi and Botticelli for music and painbng. l am
never a friend of war: I like William Morris and WnM
“Didn’t you ever search for another star?” and others. The psyc
^ free. Poetry is the story of the search for freedom. Poe ry is
story of the psyche and its trials and jubilations.
Until recent years I have never been able to make 1^ my nn
about Thoreau. I have finally settled in a roonimg hou^ ( ine
Walden House) in Montclair. Poetry^ is poor. Art is poor f oe best
things are never to be had for riches. I live on a budget of 58o a
month. I cook my own meals. I live over a stove. Tins is a real good
feed for a tramp who is used to that sort of thing. I am even con-
tented.
333
lulce (joseph brown, sj)
My Life. I was bom in st. louis in 1944. i started writing at age
II. in 1962 i entered the society of jesus. the stages of my wribng
have been guided by three men: leonard waters, sj (who told me
what i couldn’t say); john Icnoepfle (who showed me the smallest
number of words necessary) ; elliot coleman (who helped me ascertain
whether or not i had said what i intended) . the undergraduate jout*
ney was between Marquette U, and St. Louis U. i then studied at
the writing seminars at johns hopkins.
my influences, ogden nash, t. s. eliot, thomas merton.
poetry, for me, the stuff of poetry is the paradox and tlie mystery
of human e.xperience. to be honest and true, to see things clearly. >
admit my indmdual viewpoint, because i am black (or light brown,
to be exact) i am drawn to the endured suffering in this world, the
lonely songs uttered in man’s “unattended moment” i want to heat
and put doNvn. because i am a chrisrian, i believe that absurdity can
be a positive condition of humanity— a starting point for choice, i
try to recognize all of the possibilities of man. he suffers: loves:
laughs: questions: endures, to know as many approadies to tin’s mys-
tery' and paradox of reality as can be discovered and explored; my
reason for writing, my poetry is signed ‘nuke bcMuse that gospel
and the traditions of its writer seem to express most of my rambh'ngs
toward definition and identity, poetry' keeps me alive.
5 -lS
SUSAN AXELROD
I write poetry because I can and because I know the poet s
that he is happy. However exasperated by his place as an appcii ag
of his culture and troubled by paranoia and addiction, when he «
ss\Tmming in that flood of images or tliigh deep in the fecund earth
of prophecy he is the first, beloved diild. .. i
These poems are the inchoate products of my apprcnbcwhip
it is hard to say much about them. If tliey rej-ea any mfluenc^ I
hope it is of those I admire sucli as good fatlier Williams and mother
^ The Home is an actual place in Brooklyn in which I lived for
three years during my early teens. It is a love poem, wntten out ot
isolation and shyness but it is also a poem of revenge. I first took
u|) words as a weapon; as many of us, I was raised in an atmosphere
Ch^eleon I brought up blindly from some place inside ftat knew
better than (what I called) myself, what was going on. It « a po^
of personal exploration, and started as a blur of sound below my
Last winter, while studying with John Logan, I wrote the poem
Snips and Snails. It is one of several poems distilled from the juice
of this city: this big, overripe apple full of so many people who are
ready but have no place to go. . ^ i
Other particulars might include: age, twenty-five; place of birth,
Brooklyn; and present home, the Lower East Side; other teachers
and mentors Diane Wakoski and Harriet Sohmers Zwerlii^.
As for the future, I would like to find an altemafave to the poetty
of individual sensibility; to move in the direction of chants and ntuals
and do with words what the L.T. does m Paradise Now.
349
STUART PETERFEEUND
stadferafroSn' ™ BrooHyn, New York. He has
Md fe ™,rif y^Tn of’califoniia at Mne,
influences on hi<: wnK Washington. He lists as major
B™a“ AlfK^wfi “f'io'i.Roethkef Robert Creeley, John
David Ray James Wriebt^'n^”’ Eicbhom, Robert Sward,
School fa? and ov? poets of the younger American
gan Merwin TustiV#*’ <?• “T^ses allowed) such as Berryman, Lo-
acknowledeed the raw 3nd Roethke, are men, who having
has never gotten ovpr^ R being bom (something Lowell
nS nSiSv a positive,^ though
how vvithdiawtoa^frllJi. tR justified by some-
bom into their cnvn allowing themselves to be re-
I don't mean ravsHral t ” ^ worlds. And when I speak of visionary,
in the metaoho J than ' ^r^” j^^aphorical. And it is easier to live
prorctrVe ■ErprofecbV^^ being far more
idealists all far! York poets, the sur-
necessary in the creation nf f^R ™®be the value judgment
instead,Vow sdence Sr ^^^bness. Th'ey show,
questioning significance Rv recording process without
tte ‘why” "’S"^l^cance, by stressing the 'how' without questioning
reality. And^he^ onSre^liS ^ rt necessary to control a
It’s n&X most eSiHn! ^be one I make for me.
and grandfathers the feif m r^ t H ® memories of my mother
and noTwjfev^ ti^Sfst r^'
world. It’s sitrinp nnri ilrJni ■ “em, toe several times we raled the
the lad o v?w tote i S"® ‘0 '““I 0"
Il’e rtumbtoTlhmurf. t&l 2,7, J?*' I’m alive.
TTom „e many
350
THOMAS HAXNA
Age: 28
Home; bom in Utica, New York; now living in Chipiona, Spain.
Education: Cornell University and University of Buffalo.
Influences: David Ray has influenced my work, but his poems
haven’t. His poems have affected my life. If you mean yester-
day, Shakespeare, Poe, Tu Fu, the Iroquois, the Maori. I hope
to pay them off sometime.
Currently: I am trying the poetry hustle, but plan to change my line
of work.
BARBARA L. GREENBERG
in on August 27, 1932, in Boston; live now
uated fmm”w B surgeon husband and two sons. Was grad-
SfotiS w ^953. during the era of heady T. S.
of mv pram Longfellow and Whitman (the best-loved poets
nn^Jn I the greater influence
on my own poetiy. °
^Periment of any kind, I do feel that words,
snWpnri J nieaning and magic, are still the
I ?m me - ^'"^'Sht is the impulse behind it. Thus,
or iS accidental in wording, in form,
sestina^ far f think, too, that the traditional forms (e.g., the
SflenPe^n /.^^clevant in our time, still offer a vigorous
Sp ^ poet willing to work at them. If tlie impulse behind
the poem is genuine, discipline will not destroy, but, ratlfer, define it
352
DON SHEA
I am 20, was bom in New York City, and have studied poetry
under M. L. Rosenthal at N.Y.U. As to poets who have influeiired
me, problem is that the wodi is as much the computers as it is
niine. To prepare vocabulary data for the program, I had to ad ress
myself to ie question: What constitutes a poetic voc^ulary? l
could find no satisfactory theoretical guidelines here, so I chose what
seemed to me a fairly eclectic group of poems and bmh
.vocabulary of roughly 2000 w'ords— the poets included Dylan 1 no ,
Yeats, Jeffers, Robert Lowell, Frost, Stephens, Wilhams, Pound,
Eliot, and Cummings. ,
The poems presented here were written by an IBM 3®°
puter. They represent a partial selection from more than 1^0 stan-
zas, and are unaltered with the exception of punctuabon. The com
puter was prograinmed to assemble and print common gramma
stractures in a variety of verse forms. A random mixture or punc
cards was used as input, containing words with syiitecbc co es, m ^
in some cases codes indicating tense and number, pie ^ ,
selves were chosen from a sampling of poems by the a
poets.
I find no objection to the reasoning that the ^
cellent poem iri a book of verse is the response to some mood or
condition, uniquely human, that is ex^iressed
gency, ScJm evLtive power. But I think it shouM be empha^zed
tile mffi of evoking response is purely abstact. A word or
sentence spoken face to face is a total physiological expression, re-
plete wit^esture and intonation, while a word or combination of
words on a printed page is a very different thmg. In any case, the
quStioTof meanini must be distinguished from the que^on of
geSs- intelligibiHiy, at whatever level, does not depend u^n
‘“humaW' nroduction. It depends upon human interpretation. The
au^on is not how what we read was written, but rather, how we
understand and respond to what we read.
353
STAN RICE
October 1969) 26. Bom Dallas, Texas. Moved with
Francisco in 1962. Presently living in Berkeley,
California. Studied literature and creative writing at North Texas
^ate University, University of San Francisco, San Francisco State
College, and University of Cahfomia at Berkeley. Took creative writ-
ing courses under Robert Duncan, John Logan and William Dickey.
Influential poets include: Levertov, Tu Fu, mihnan, Blake,
Roet^e, Stein, Pound. I am presently an Assistant Professor of Crea-
tive Writing at San Frandsco State College engaged in an educa-
tional revolution in favor of new definitions of learning and opposed
to an archaic and monarchial political Tmsteeship. Also I am the
^sistant Director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State Col-
lege.
I believe poems are metaphorical statements about human con-
sciousn^s. My best poems are written about feelings that confuse
worst poems are word-games written about words
and about what words can do. When a poem clicks for me I will
until it feels whole. It feels “whole” when it has about it
all the coherence, mystery, ambiguity and sensuous rhythms which
assoaate \\ith any Living Thing. I crave a passionate luddity. To
without passion is a bore to write, and to be passionate
P ferodous clarity is a bore to read. Every gesture of my
auy life is the subject matter for poetry but sometimes I am dumb
and closed and rannot see the meanings around me. Metaphysically
a poem for me is a sort of shrine whose symbolic forms praise the
m^mngfulness of aU things; physically it is a block of language
which feels good in the brain above and slightly behind my eyes. I
wnte at mght. All poetry proceeds from the Body
354
FLOYCE ALEXANDER
Most of my life has been spent in the provinces. I was bom in
Fort Smith, Arkansas, grew up in Wellington, Kansas, and Granger,
Washington, and now live in Pullman, Washington. All small towns
except for five years in Seattle and return-ticket journeys to New
Orleans, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
On 7 May, 1969, I was married with Paula Joy Thornton.
On December 51, 1968, I turned 30. For six years I’ve worked as
an editor for Washington State University Press. I have a B.A. from
the University of Washington where I met Theodore Roethke and
Darid Wagoner, among other writers. I began writing poems out-of-
school and taking them to Roethke. He encouraged me to continue.
^^ong my elders I admire the work of Gary Snyder, James
Wright, John Logan, Robert Greeley, W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell,
Ren6 Char, and Andrei Voznesensky. Of the dead I continue to read
Whitman, Hart Crane, Kafka, Blake, Cesar Vallejo, and Johannes
Bobrowski. I don’t even know how much I’ve learned from teachers
of the soul; Robert Bly, Howard McCord, and Betty Ludington,
sculptor, painter, potter, weaver.
It I am to see as much of the universe as I can, I must become
capable of seeing through my own senses. The way I hear, and how-
ever I may touch, smell, or taste, this world provides the poem with
its skeleton, as the eyes give it its marrow. TTie secret of the poem
is balance, suspension of consciousness behveen mental clarity and
imaginative density.
Nowhere deals with a kind of utopia where the spirit is created
in a moment of fusion between human and inhuman roots. The
same process occurs in Poem for a Painter, but the presence of the
Vietnam war and the young painter, ravaged by that war, make the
poem more a lamentation than a celebration. Aphrodite hovers be-
tween sadness and joy: perhaps nostalgia gives the poem its balance.
The Lotus Eaters was written the day after King’s murder, in a
state of outrage which connected the immediacy of the event with
my own Southern ancestry. Li Po, composed two months later,
evokes a nostalgia similar to Aphrodite in its content, though the
form has mellowed in the two years separating those poems. Guer-
rilla tries to bring together two questions: How are humans to re-
ceive the most fundamental necessities of life? Is love— deep, rich
love— possible in a world where plunder is accepted and rape en-
couraged through the apathy of the comfortable?
ROCHELLE RATNER
Bom December 1948 in Atlantic City, N.J., and still living there.
■ began taking poetry seriously at age twelve and have been attempt-
ing to study it on my own ever since. In the winter of 1968, I re-
ceived encouragement from A. R. Ammons and studied at Bread
Loaf Writers'^ Conference the following summer.
It seems as if words on the page are pleading to become a language
of silence. I’m plagued by emotions, and forever searching for new
images to describe or defend them. Thus, each word that finds its
way into the poem is a tight construction with many different mean-
ings. I tty to keep the poem as short as possible— hoping the careful
discover as much joy, if not more, in the things left unsaid.
The only form I include in poems is the one that best describes
the moment of composition. In poems such as The Maiden, what
might appear to have been a planned format was almost completely
accidental. This is how it should be.
356
WILLIAM WITHERUP
Bom in Kansas Citj’, Missouri, on March 24, 1935- Currently
living in San Francisco. Have done at least one quarter at the fol-
lowing institutions: Willamette University; The University of Wash-
ington; the University of Oregon; the University of Maiydand Over-
seas Extension and San Francisco State College. Have studied under
Ted Roethke and James B. Hall. Am curren% employed as a ware-
houseman.
Poets who have had the greatest influence on my work^ are Theo-
dore Roethke, Robert Ely, Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico Garcia
Lorca, Pablo Nerada, Enrique Lihn, Nicanor Parra and most recently
Alejandro Romualdo. _ .
The poem comes out of silence, out of the creative matrix at the
center of each of us. With me the poem usually begins vyith an em-
bryonic image in the womb of the unconscious. The writing of the
poem is the bringing to birth of the nascent image. In the process,
‘ as the image takes more definite form, it draws other images to rt
and this cluster of images finds its own rhythm as syntax. Generally,
the germinating image is the strongest image in the poem. It is me
central energy. On the Death of Theodore Roethke and Mananat
Tassajara Springs are good examples. They both end with powerful
images, images that I was only partly aware of, that I was pregnant
with, that cried for birth, that glimmered in the uncoriscious night
but that gradually took precise form in the patient labor of coiri-
position. The true poem is as much a discovery for the poet as it is
for the reader. _ -u n. r
As for that Waterloo of literary criticism, prosody or rhytnm, i
believe quite simply that you have to have a good ear. As the image
rises out of silence, so does rhythm. The verbal texture exists in
counterpoint to the silence surrounding it. I often think ot the white
space of the page that engulfs the poem as a visual metaphor of
this silence. Some of my poems begin out of a need to give form
to a rhythmic emotion that in the beginning has no imagery in min .
I am merely carried forward into the poem by ari unconsacms vocal
gestus. Hybrid VillaneUe on a Line of Li Po is one such poem;
begun merely in response to my reading of a Ij Po poem,
e- Poetry is language at its most physical ^encan poetry is Am^-
ican language at iS most physical, as di^nct torn Bnbsh English
I feel a good poem in my whole body. Often dunng composihon I
move around a lot. Though I do not listen to munc when I w^e,
I often feel like breaking into a rock dance. Then I know that a true
poem is working, that I am not forcing it.
EDGAR PAIEWONSKY
Republic; grew up there; then moved
to Urug^; then Peru. Finished high school in St. Thomas, Virgin
^ began to read and write English poetry. One year at
the University of Puerto Rico-my writing was helped by Prof.
Cumpiano. :Uter, at N.Y.U., I worked under Robert Hazel
h ^ ™ teaching at Fordham University, De-
partment of Modem Languages. I’m twenty-six and married. My
favonte poets are Machado, Vallejo, Paz, Eliot, Williams, Roethke,
Michaux. Concretism has clearly influenced me.
the last year I ve been involved almost exclusively with Icons-
IS anthj^gy presents a selection— articulated in a meaningful
sequence. The reader should remember that each segment was orig-
j separate card, as a unit in itself. This allowed me
o s u e the cards freely, often arriving at combinations that would
ngger ott new icons. I have attempted to read the physical world
as a map of my own self. In each of these pieces I’ve tried to isolate
a mountain and a valley on this map. The detail, I believe, reveals
e mechanism that underlies the whole. Essences are physical: the
sperm; the egg; their fusion.
TJe corremondence between myself and the world has led me to
rejert metaphor or any other poetic device. The only “metaphor”
word EYES because it functions as an illustra-
tion of the formula that follows it.
Icons has been emerging slowly. I think of it as the record of my
quest. I beb'eve it will increasingly depend on both
words and visual symbols to communicate its meaning.
358
SANDFORD LYNE
24. Bom, Kendallvillc, Indiana. Moved soon after to Ocala,
Florida, and later Paducah, Kentucky, where my family lived most
of my life. Attended Oberlin College: B.A. in English literature,
1968. Robert Ober and I shared the same house on and off while
undergraduates, and I think I learned the most about miting from
the explorations we were each making during that time and the dis-
oissions we had about them. Robert Bly also offered valuable crit-
icism. My sister (who looks like the actress Julie Christie) gave early
encouragement to my interest in being an artist. The woods and lakes
around iny home contributed much to the sense of proportion I try
to hold in mind toward most things that fascinate me. I could not
have written recent poems without the presence of Kennette, who
IS wonderful and has shared everything.
Early poems were influenced by Robert Bly, James Wright, and
Galway Kinnell. Recent work (written since the poems were chosen
for this book) has been influenced by the poems of Gary Snyder and
James Koller, and bears little resemblance to the poems printed here.
Formal poetics usually bore me. Intra-specific aggression exists be-
tu-een poets, and anthologies of established poets read like ecological
suwe5^s: Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, Sixties poets
and Kayak poets, academics East & West. With cross-breeding and
m some cases cross-pollination. Poets of the generation of ’62 offered
us the Apocalj'pse, filing two by hvo into tlie Surrealist Ark. The
Eastern mind, symbolized by the drifting small boat, is hardly so
categorical, divisive, and desperate. A sense of Unity in all things re-
place a sense of moral superiority. Political commitment need not
ngidify poetic explorations. For these reasons I try to avoid being
a poetician. Pablo Neruda wrote without theories, though this fact
has been subverted into a rigid dogma of the image. Neruda kept
himself free of literary polemic and adapted to the best explorations
of each new generation of poets, most often exceeding their efforts.
In American poetry, only the range of Gary Snyder’s poems attests
to an equal energy and independence.
One last note: The half-time announcer at the 1969 Superbowl
football game gave us this to consider: “The band will now execute
the traditional designs and symbols of our national heritage.” As a
one-man band, I try to accomplish the same thing in my poems.
There is no nourishment in our present Daley bread.
359
PETER FELLOWES
Age 25; bom Washington, D.C.; present residence Fredericksburg,
Virginia; B.A. Colgate University, MA. Johns Hopkins University.
I have studied writing under Bruce Berlind at Colgate and Elliott
Coleman at Johns Hopkins; the former tried to teach me discipline
and scmples, with the latter I began to hear a voluble silence and
to understand the rehgiousness of words. My present occupation is
Instructor of English at Mary Washington College.
What I am trying to do in my poetry is to confront the world as
it sits in my backyard and in the back of my head; I am trying to
understand it, bringing to it my own biases and complaints, to speak
to it and more importantly, to listen. Sometimes this encounter fails
to come off; it gets myopic, mischievous or merely zany— the ego-
mania of things overpowers my words. Other times my words are
able to free themselves, both from the sticky world and from a sbcly
me, to explore in their naive resonances the distances. But this is
still in my poetry an urge that has yet to fulfill itself; most of the
time I'm simply trying to get close enough to hear.
360
COLETTE INEZ
Bom 38 years ago in Bmssels, Belgium, and brougM up in a Cath-
olic home for children. (My mother language is Fr“ch but toe
mothering has ceased.) I now live in the middle of New 1^
with my husband, and teach English to Spanish ladies in ®
Poverty Program. Once took a course with Denise Levertov, whose
influence like a distant w'ave was slow to come but strong an _ eep
when it arrived. Touched “zero in the bone” with Emily Dicfanson
and journeyed in the w'armer, more luxuriant zones ot Wa a<x
Stevens. Both these poets helped form my rhythm s early an
Sound is crucial to my poems— assonance, internal rhynip^,^ a it
eration— and I like repeated tones as “lemur” and summer, rw
and “water,” in Unaware That Avessek . . . , a poem ^
a geological map of Passadumkeag, Maine. I tend to be
adjectives, and enjoy the spring-lock tightriess of t^um
tiines results in using one-sj'Uable end-line words, bee ou ,
“smoke,” “roast,” ‘Hove,” “things,” and “grips” in the first three
stanzas of Force of Snow. And there is also a feeling in my wor ■
muscular verbs; “grip,” “scrape,” “crash,” and “triggers . . .
The Woman Who Loved Worms, my longest poem, began wito
a narang but common enough \'ision of a butterfly. Sonm
fore 1 had read of an 11th-century Japanese woman, who, ae^ng
the customs of her times, experimented with weevih ®
was looHng for the principles underlying beauty. It took two yeare
for the poem to shape itself in my unconscious terrain, bu
fledged, I had only to listen, that is, to engage in a kind of divine
attention, for the poem to be written.
But most of my other poems arrive piecemeal, sometimes ^tn a
first line, other times with only one word, even an or
which the moment has made fresh and full of /I ,
example. Force of Snmv began with the word “ordeal (I later
wrenched it out), and that soUtary word haunted me for days until
I put it down on paper. Also, unlike some poets, tides come easily
to me, and they wall in time demand a poem to look down on. An
instance: the name Cold Waltzes danced in my mind months before
I seized die first line of the poem. •
The first drafts of my poems are often overcrowded with images,
and like a mthless landlord, I force myself to evict lines-wen lines
I like as “nightstick wind" in the ongmal Slummght. But to get the
spareness and single metaphor of the first tivo stanzas, I had to nd
the poem of ei-ery lax and unnecessary phrase.
I love poetry and cannot think of any hfe without it.
WILLIAM BROWN
A native of Los Angeles, William Brown attended Calvin College
and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He spent two years in Europe and
now h’ves in New York City, where he makes his living as a freelance
writer and editor. He is tMrty.
“I would hTce to work out a 'poetics’— that is, I would like_ to
know what I’m doing when I write. This would enable me, I think,
to write poems very much different from the ones printed here. I
imagine these future poems as fuller, longer and earthier, I am trying,
in short, to write like Shakespeare, and I hope that some of my
contemporaries will do the same. It would make things much more
interesting than they are now.”
362
GERALD BUTLER
I was bom in San Francisco in 1942, during a war that s being
forgotten: A.B. Berkeley, Ph.D. University of Washington. In classes,
Jo Miles, Thom Gunn, John Logan encouraged me, but it was
Ginsberg’s Howl in 1956 that first made me think wnters said any^
thing, and it was Wayne Bums at U.W. who helped rne un ers an
what I was doing. Now I teach English at San Diego State 0 eg
It’s sunny here. , . j £
I go on writing, not knowing why, though I have an °
writing is: discovering what it’s like, or would be like, to oe^a 1
a discovery always in some sense against the law, because
posed to stay dumb. We hear a lot about “technique and term
lately, how a piece of art is supposed to “work.” That s all 1 “^ ®
sophisticated form of censorship, a way of keeping one s eyes ave
from the content, the vision. . .
When I write something, more and more I feel someone is g
to take revenge on me for doing it. A few years ago I still had cnaim
T . .T . 1 Ti _ T)OCIIl. i3Ut HOW
especially it it s in prose, suiec ^
ously. Even so, my Malcolm X poem never made rne many fnends
—white or black. I suppose because it has a little feelmg ^ .
him, jerk that he was to get killed. Saying anything at all
risky, let alone writing. I can’t think of much else to do while wait-
ing, though. I’ll see how the novel hits, my Little Girl Lost. 1
suppose that the worst that can happen is to have my ■
missed as personal gloominess, to be told to cheer up an g
La' Jolla really has a beautiful beach. You can sMm in the ocean
even during the winter.
It isn’t enough.
363
DAN GILLESPIE
Age, thirty. Bom in Ardmore, Oldahoma. I’ve lived and worked
in many areas in the western states, but most of my hfe spent in
Utah. I've worked continuously hrom the age of sixteen, taking my
education in spare time, ranch hand, truck driver, construction, as-
sembly lines, lumberyards, warehouses, reluctant soldier, etc. At-
tended the University of Utah over a period of eight years, on and
off, English, philosophy, social sciences. No advanced degrees.^ My
work in English did not include “creative writing.” Currently living
in Midvale, Utah, working as a warehouseman.
Influences on my work: James Wri^t, A. R. Ammons, Galw^
Kinnel, John Haines. I try to write poetiy that is simple, sttpj^,
direct, and felt; poetiy that speaks in straightforward communication.
My poems reflect my social and cultural preoccupations: a regional
bias (the mountain West), a personal search for roots and a sense
of tradition (historical Mormonism), and a deep-felt distrust for the
sodal and technological currents of this country. The man who has
seen Los Angeles has seen the future.
My poems are invariably “about something.” That is, they are
attempts at poetic statements, rather than artistic-intellectual word
games, which, however much thq^ may attract and amuse, rarely
move the reader to an act of self-recognition or emotional response.
The poems in this book, hopefully, stand on tiieir own, and should
be understood on first reading without the need for “ciifa'cal inter-
pretation.” The poems should reach out and touch, not mystify. I
hope they have done so.
364
FANNY HOWE
I W'as bom in BuEFalo, New York, in October 1940, but I spent
most of my life in New England. For five years I lived in California
—two of those years at Stanford, where I studied literature with Yvor
Winters and Frank O’Connor and took a writing course from Mal-
colm Cowley. After that I dropped out of college and never went
back. Instead I had jobs and wrote pulp paperbacks for extra money.
I don’t know which poets have influenced me as well as the poets
whose work I like. Among Americans, Dickinson, Stevens, Williams,
Berry-man, Lowell, and Plath. 'The writer who has influenced me the
most is Edward Dahlberg, not only for his own work, but for the
works of writers he revealed to me— including Juvenal, Aristotle and
Darwin. Their work was so remote to this civilization and this cul-
ture (and so relevant), I began to uncover svhat was unique in the
American language, what is honest in its tone and musical in its
rhythms and sounds.
I have no particular credo where poetry goes; only that the heart
is still the best judge of a good poem. To write a clumsy poem that
is honest is better (and more rare) than to write a smooth poem
that is a lie. In the three poems printed here I have tried to supply
each with a content (style) that relates to the style (content) of
the poem.
At present I live in Marblehead, Mass., with my husband. I teach
poetry at Tufts University and published a book of novellas and
stories with Houghton-Mifflin in October.
CPxAIG STERRY
Age 26, bom August 15, 1943. Spent first 20 years living on and
around my father’s wheat farm in north-central Montana. Took a
degree in English from a small Montana teacher’s college. Worked
as a farm laborer and RR telegrapher. Went to Michigan State U,
for graduate degree in American h'terature and quit. Joined the Mer-
chant Marines and quit. Tried editing a little magazine and quit.
Bummed off my friends while deciding what to do next. Now at Uni-
versity of California at Irvine working for an M.F.A. degree in crea-
tive writing.
I started writing when I was about 19. Kept at it witliout a real
sense of commitment until I was 23 or so. Which is just about the
time I gave up on graduate school, threw out my old poems and
started over. Greatest help and biggest influence was my brother
Rick, who, with the patience of a priest, read every poem I ever
wrote. ^ ^
366
DENIS JOHNSON
At the moment I am married with one child. So far the only col
lege I have attended is the U of Iowa, where I am now an under-
graduate. I have studied writing here under John Morgan and Ueorge
Chambers, two poets who have very recently appeared, and under
George Starbuck and Marvin Bell, both of whom have been aroun
for a while. I was bom in Munich, Germany, in July 1949.
“Things seem to become more clear when I \ynte ft em down
is about as close as I can get to a statement of poefacs. y
Aging Here and Checking the Traps are two poems which are born
directly from this sentiment. The latter poem was the beginning ot
a minor obsession I had for syncopating two^ncems of the poem
within what I hoped was a coherent whole. The poem about base-
balls was the culmination of this experiment. My only syllabic poem
to date is In a Rented Room. I was interested in seeing how long
and unvaried I could make the lines before the poem began to sag
under their weight. Probably my favorite out of this five is The Man
Among the Seals. It came from nowhere in particular, which seems
to be a good place for poems to come from.
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
A beerbottle annada bobs in the rain-
bow
ORR
125
‘a brown, blaclc-spotted butterfly’
ALEXANDER
222
a man surprising himself
BARKS
83
A slight stirring darlcness
LUKE
167
A thin wool coat was the je^v of him
GREENBERG
202
An infected vein
WITHERUP
240
And call it the maiden ladies day.
GREENBERG
200
And that was the hottest summer
PETERFREUND
181
And the hunger
KAUFMAN
21
Animals of the forest & plants of the
field.. . .
HARMON
39
Another day when being
ORR
131
Antlers of a buried intelligence
FELLOWES
259
Are you whistling
HAMILTON
10
at night here in the park it is different:
JOHNSON
327
Bearded relatives I never knew
STERRY
314
Berries on the outwash plain.
INEZ
267
Black, the sun floats melting,
SHEA
209
Brooding,
RATNER
232
but
HAMILTON
1
but I don’t know
HAMILTON
9
But nevertheless there are some other
kinds . . .
HAMILTON
2
But usually, words fill our heads . . .
BUTLER
292
Can it roast a duck?
PETERFREUND
180
Can you see the bird coming through
bushes
ALEXANDER
225
Change
PAIEWONSKY
243
QUICKLY AGING HERE
Coining back and
STEimy
320
Compare needles to the shrewd injec-
tors of the State:
ALEXANDER
228
Contrast Rooster's white feathers
HAMILTON
12
Daily the rooms in which
DROrSTT
279
Day of hunting done,
DOW
57
Death is patiently
DOW
56
did you say
HAMILTON
3
Digging,
RATNER
233
Disdaining butterflies
INEZ
269
Do not ask of me
BARKS
77
Dolphins Rampant
BROWN
275
Don’t leave
CASTRO-LEON
97
Drunk on the moon, a sage of dreams.
WITHERUP
241
Each night has new meaning
RICE
216
Engineers
WITHERUP
237
Failing in business, grandfather
HATHAWAY
141
First he rushed over to a
SOLT
132
Floating with your head back
BARKS
88
for years the scenes bustled
JOHNSON
323
Gin is white, for a white while.
HAMILTON
8
Give us time
HAMILTON
11
Going up for the jump shot.
HILTON
111
He does remember. Back to the bloom
GREENBERG
199
He is a timid man
HILTON
118
He said how much he had died for the
sake
ALEXANDER
224
370
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
He’d ne\-ex wiung the
cnErNnmrc
CO
CT'
n
He’s been sick
CAUDAREI.,!.!
73
He’s off soniTO’here
CARDAREt.1.1
74
Her sldn runs— white stripes..
SHEA
zoS
Here is a place you’s-e ne\-cr been.
rE\TIlAW.AY
139
His day closes like a dry mouth.
niLTON*
114
His mouth is open.
BROWN
278
Huddled in your house,
ALEXANDER
226
I am at sea, sort of. The slime is
coral. . . .
RtCE
212
I dream you naked on a float, blown
up
GREENBERG
204
I had asked you to try again
HANNA
192
I had gone to see a fortune teller . . .
STERRY
318
I open my family magazine, pretty
HATHAWAY
149
I remember your hair
WTTHERDP
238
I said I’d let life battle it out
EELLO'WES
260
I sit drinking wine.
PETERFREDND
184
I stopped to watch you.
GELEESPrE
298
I was driving north
STEIUrY
317
I will give you a purpose.
ORR
124
If I could be bom an animal;
RICE
2H
If one day you are walking along
TRUDEEL
100
In and between the cities
TRUDELE
105
In 1846
GILEESPIE
294
In Granada baths are de rigeur; there-
fore . . .
DIPAERIA & SHRADER
162
In her little tent Honey Bumps
HATHAWAY
150
In Minnesota the bams are black
WITHERUP
235
371
QUICKLY AGING HERE
In rooms of stone
GILLESPIE
302
In taverns,
LYNE
251
In tlie accident
HILTON
n6
In the marrow of the living
STERRY
321
In the news
SHEA
206
In whatever galaxy,
LYNE
256
Invisible hammers
CASTRO-LEON
91
It is over, it is
LYNE
253
It is red
RATNER
229
It’s a cage I'm building.
TORGERSEN
30
Jasmine sees intentions cveiy'whcrc
Jesus! she’s thin. She squirms in her
HOWE
304
sleep
ORR
126
Just finger prints and drool
CARDARELLI
61
Just short of the isthmus, the court
SHRADER
151
Landscapes are all we get
FELLOWES
262
late
CASTRO-LEON
92
Less than Angelic
DOW
58
LOBELIA
SOLT
133
Lowercase jensen, that’s dangerous
TORGERSEN
3^
lunch paper sinking
BARKS
79
MARIGOLD
SOLT
135
Mine are the tactics
BROWN
283
More on a mission
BROWN
281
morning,
Morphine combined with scopolamine
JOHNSON
329
is called
BUTLER
290
moving with her
BARKS
87
372
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
Must have begun through Friday
My father is a strange man
My friend who married tlie girl I
My love sometimes mahes her shrill
My week-days pile in me like dirty
clothes.
My wife has tattoos on her neck
My women sunound me,
Never to risit you
nothing to drink in the
November— but the town
Now
On a rainy day, a sky
One cloud, one day,
Otliers always skip over the word
Out into rain, out into slow streets,
out into . . .
Pale new lights cling
past all Calculation & belief it Came
so huge
poem
Poor Ed Sanders: no sooner had
gotten in good . . •
Rose do you know
Sauerkraut talk shreds in his ear.
See where black water
CAnD.\nELi.r
STE-RRY
KAUFMAN
DOW
64
519
13
55
PAtEW’ONSKY
242
TORGERSEN
34
nANNA
191
SHEA
205
JOHNSON
3^5
trudell
103
HARMON
43
feleowes
265
HAAnETON
5
mETON
112
*^8
TORGERSEN
SHEA
207
HARMON
46
HARMON
e
40
HARMON
42
cardareeet
71
268
INEZ
gieeesfie
303
QUICKLY AGING HERE
In rooms of stone
CILI-nSPIE
302
In taverns,
LYNE
251
In the accident
niI.TON
116
In the marrow of the living
STERRY
321
In tlie news
SHEA
206
In whatever galaxy.
LTi-NE
256
Invisible hammers
CASTRO-LEON
91
It is over, it is
LYNE
253
It is red
RATNER
229
It’s a cage I’m building.
TORGERSEN
30
Jasmine sees intentions everywhere
nowE
304
Jesus! she's thin. She squirms in her
sleep
ORR
126
Just finger prints and drool
CARDARELEI
61
Just short of the isthmus, the court
SHRADER
151
Landscapes are all we get
FEEEOWES
262
late
CASTRO-LEON
92
Less than Angelic
DOW
58
LOBELIA
SOLT
133
Lowercase jensen, that’s dangerous
TORGERSEN
31
lunch paper sinking
BARKS
79
MARIGOLD
SOLT
135
Mine are the tactics
BROWN
283
More on a mission
BROWN
281
morning.
JOHNSON
329
Morphine combined with scopolamine
is called
BUTLER
290
moving with her
BARKS
87
372
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
Must have begun through Friday
My father is a strange man
My friend who married the girl I
My love sometimes makes her shrill
My week-days pile in me like dirty
clothes.
My wife has tattoos on her neck
My women surround me.
Never to visit you
nothing to drink in the
November— but the town
Now
CARDARELLI
64
STERRY
319
haufman
13
DOW
55
paiewonsky
242
TORGERSEN
34
HANNA
191
SHEA
205
JOHNSON
325
TRDDELL
103
HARMON
43
On a rainy day, a sky
One cloud, one day.
Others always skip over the word
Out into rain, out into slow streets,
out into . . •
fellowes
HAMILTON
HILTON
TORGEKSEN
Pale new lights cling
; past all Calculation & belief it Came
I so huge
I poem
^ 1 Poor Ed Sanders: no sooner had he
. gotten in good . . •
1 :
‘ Rose do you know
Sauerkraut talk shreds in his ear;
j. See where black water
SHEA
HARMON
HARMON
harmon
cardarelli
INEZ
GILLESPIE
265
5
112
38
207
46
40
42
71
268
303
42 L
373
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